New Lab Topology

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I haven't had much of a chance to work on my new machine but the lab is coming together, slowly.

This is what I'm working on right now.

 

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Interesting lab environment, I would be interested in hearing about your Storage choice, What are you planning on running on the hypervisors and what's the requirement for physical servers? Are you planning on deploying View\Horizon?

 

Hi Simon,
essentially all of this sits on a single PC under VMware Workstation. I have a diagram which shows the actual setup but this shows what I'm trying to simulate in a realworld environment.

For storage I'm using an EMC Virtual Appliance (In work at the moment but I'll post a link when I get home).

The servers I've designated as physical would include things like my primary domain controller.

Beyond the core Microsoft technologies I'll also be working on a number of things like Citrix XenApp and SCCM. Eventually I do want to look at VDI but I'll probably lean towards the Citrix implementation as a potential employer I'm keen to work for uses that.

 

Don't discount actual physical infrastructure, I love Workstation but it's not as powerful as the full blown vSphere suite.

I just purchased a couple of the HP Gen8 Microservers for my resource cluster, a 16GB box cost me less than £240 but I will be changing the cpu out for a Xeon in the next couple of months if I find them lacking (currently it's the Celeron cpu in there but as it's only for small linux VM's I am not really too worried about the cpu's for the moment).

 

Just spotted the cash back deal on the HP Gen8 Microservers. They come out at around £100 each before adding/swapping additional components. A very good deal. My only concern would be the RAM limit. I'd want at least 32GB per host.

Do you know if the maximum RAM is actually limited in the bios? 16GB chips are fairly reasonable these days.

 

I believe that first of all it's the CPU that's limiting ram, the celeron is limited to 16GB, obviously Xeons are rated higher but when you start throwing the cost of parts you may well be better off sticking to something else. Don't get me wrong, the MicroServer suits me down to the ground as part of a consumer cluster, it's aim is simply to host small VM's for testing things like VMware vRealize Automation rather than any management infrastructure.

I also have to admit to looking at those SuperMicro boards as slot in replacements for my Shuttles, let's see what the bonus is like this year.