My Perfect vSphere 6.0 Home Lab

Back in 2014, when I actually started making a decent paycheck, I decided it was time to build out a good, yet low powered lab at my house. Since running two Dell T610s was the opposite of economic for my home electric bill, I set my sights on the following, taking a note from Ryan Birk over at VirtualInsanity:

• Pair of Shuttle SZ87R6 loaded with:

• Intel i7-4770

• 32GB DDR3

• Intel Pro/1000 PT Dual Port 1GbE

• Syba Dual Port 1GbE

• Samsung 840 EVO 120GB

• HP ProCurve 1810-24G

• Synology DS412+ loaded with:

• Western Digital Red 4TBs in a RAID10

Now, we aren't going to be breaking any sound barriers with this kind of configuration nor setting new performance records, but it gets me by in a pinch, and doesn't hammer my ear drums all day with server-grade exhaust fans.

From there, it was just a matter of installing everything. Ryan has a great write up on how to get ESXi 6.0 to behave on this unsupported hardware, so I would highly recommend reviewing his article mentioned above.

At the time of writing most of these articles, here is all of the software used in my lab:

• vCenter Server Appliance 6.0U1 (Build 3339084)

• Platform Services Controller 6.0U1 (Build 3339084)

• vCenter Update Manager 6.0U1 (Build 3005497)

• ESXi 6.0U1 (Build 3247720)

• vRealize Operation Manager 6.2.1a (Build )

• vRealize Log Insight 3.0 (Build 3021606)

• NSX for vSphere 6.2.1 (Build )