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:
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 )
