As a part of my training in IT, I’ve put together a test lab at home on which I plan to test out networking and virtualization projects.
Here is an overview of how I got started, a list of parts that I found useful, and the general layout of the setup
Objective
At the end of the project, I wanted to have a server running a hypervisor with several virtual machines acting as servers running on the hypervisor. From there, I wanted to create a standard Windows server environment with a domain controller, file & print server, and other VMs as necessary for testing.
The Computer
The first order of business was putting together a computer so that I could properly start using virtualization of servers.
I chose to base my lab around VMWare ESXi 6.7 as a type 1 (bare-metal) hypervisor, primarily because it seemed well supported and because the most recent version (7.0 as of this post) was not supported by Quest Rapid Recovery, which I planned to test out later if possible.
Putting together a computer that worked with ESXi, however, proved to be a bit of a challenge, primarily because of the networking requirements. ESXi supports networking cards that are found on servers, but does not support most of the networking interfaces/cards commonly found on your average desktop computer, which I planned on using because I wasn’t thrilled with the volume of the fans on the servers I have here (a decision which was fully endorsed by my office mate who has to put up with my lab environment.)
After scrounging for parts I found a single port gigabit NIC (network interface card) manufactured by Intel that worked well.
With the NIC out of the way, I was able to start building around my existing gaming rig. As mentioned above, I’m building this system on existing hardware, and luckly ESXi 6.7 seems to support pretty much everything else.
One area of concern was storage. The gaming rig at home is used for that: gaming. It doesn’t have removable drives or a RAID card, and my plan was to add several drives: one for Windows (gaming) one for Linux, and another just for ESXi. I also had a TON of spare 2.5″ disk I recovered from laptops that I wanted to use for this project.
I’d run into problems dual booting Linux and Windows on the same disk (normally not a problem, but Peppermint 10 would not recognize my Windows partition and after several hours I cut my losses and just threw it on a separate drive. Problem Solved!) which was another factor in my decision.
The gaming rig has several internal bays for 3.5″ hard drives, however, I wanted the ability to swap out drives and test out other types of software RAID (more on that in another post), so I looked and found an ideal solution on NewEgg in the form of an ICY Dock.
The ICY Dock I chose supported up to six 2.5″ , all of which are stored in removable bays, have activity lights (which work most of the time), and only required 2 SATA power cables!
N.B.: Some buyers on NewEgg mentioned that their larger 12mm 2.5″ disk didn’t fit inside the ICY Dock bay slots, but I’m happy to report that all of the drives I’m using for the project fit just fine. Some other buyers mentioned that the bays get warm (they do) and that it wasn’t solidly constructed. For the form factor (a Single 5″ drive bay), I was willing to put up with some minor cuts in quality. I haven’t had any issues yet but I can see why some were skeptical of the construction of the bays.
So, with the NIC interface installed and the ICY Dock loaded with 6 disks, I was finally ready to install ESXi 6.7!
Installation
The easiest way to install ESXi 6.7 is with a bootable USB. I used Rufus to burn the ISO of ESXi 6.7 onto a thumb drive, selected that drive from the BIOS, and was off and running!
ESXi did a decent job of doing pre-installation checks (which is how I determined my onboard NIC wasn’t going to work), and the process goes by really quick. You basically set up a root user password and ESXi takes care of the rest.
WARNING
WHEN INSTALLING ESXi BE VERY, VERY CAREFUL WHEN CHOOSING THE DISK THAT YOU WILL INSTALL ESXi ON! ESXi WILL OVERWRITE THE CONTENTS OF A DISK DURING THE INSTALLATION PROCESS. IF YOUR LAB IS PART OF A DAILY-DRIVE/GAMING RIG, I HIGHLY ENCOURAGE YOU TO REMOVE ALL OTHER HARD DRIVES PRIOR TO INSTALLATION TO PREVENT THEM FROM BEING OVERWRITTEN!
Once ESXi is installed, it’s best practice to assign the ESXi host a static IP address. To reduce complexity I disabled IPv6 and gave the machine a static IP outside my routers DHCP scope. I could then access the ESXi WebGUI from Firefox (or any web browser for that matter.)