Homelab update – February 2023
A few days ago I had an opportunity to buy some used hardware that was going to be thrown away. Among all that was a 2U Supermicro server with two E5-2620v4 CPUs and 256 GB of DDR4 RAM. It has 8 LFF slots with caddies but there is no RAID controller and drives are connected directly to the motherboard as JBOD.
It took me a day or two to decide what to do with it and how to utilize it. I will run vSphere on the host with some virtual machines for the lab, like Active directory server, vCenter, Veeam Backup and Replication, vRealize Operations Manager and so on.
I also decided to nest TrueNAS Core on it. I will dedicate up to 64 GB RAM to it and disks will be in passthrough mode so TrueNAS can fully utilize them. I can then map iSCSI LUNs to this host and also to all other hosts in my homelab.
So for the TrueNAS I installed four consumer grade 1 TB SATA SSD drives with converter kit in four slots and in the other four have 2 TB WD RED drives installed. Recently I also bought two Intel DC P3600 400GB SSD NVMe drives that will work as caching drives.
But the issue was, where to install ESXi. And I thought of buying a bit better USB key to host my installation, but to my surprise I discovered two 64 GB SATA DOM devices inside the server. This keeps getting better and better.
I configured the IPMI so that I can remotely manage the server and then I also installed vSphere 7.0.
This is the first step on utilizing my new host. I will continue this in the next blog post where I will talk about rebuilding my environment from scratch with deployment of first domain controller and vCenter. Stay tuned.