Inside Virtual Byte's Data Center & Home Lab! #vmware #datacenter #cloud

To welcome the New Year 2023!

Update of the new Home Data Center and Home Lab! All Running VMware vSphere 8 / Cloud environment

Production Environment:
3 x Dell PowerEdge R740 SFF - vSAN Cluster (10TB All Flash)
1 x Dell PowerEdge R740 LFF - Archive Node (70TB)
1 x Dell PowerEdge R740 LFF - NAS/SAN (100TB)

Lab Environment:
3x Dell PowerEdge R730XD Lab environment

Networking:
2 x Arista DCS 7050QX-SF 40Gb - Running BGP for VMware Networking and Security (NSX)
1 x Dell PowerEdge R330 pFsense Firewall

Each of the new Dell PowerEdge R740s have:
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2 x Intel Xeon Processor Gold 6138 2.0GHZ 27.5M 20 CORE 125W
512 GB DDR4 ECC Micron Memory
6 x 800GB SAS SSDs
1 x Intel BOSS M.2 w/240GB (Boot)
1 x 4x10Gb Intel I350 NDC
2 x Mellanox Connect-X4 ProEN 40Gb/s
2 x 1600watt PSUs
1 x Dell HBA330

[andrewmccallum]

Really ace walk through & slick setup, impressive, top investment for you, awesome to see the level of attention for what you've done, thanks for sharing the tips too.

[cjchico]

That's insane, are those all R750's at the top? If so, that rack is probably worth more than my house lol.

[firedurek]

honestly this is the best intro to homelab I saw on youtube

[ryanstrom]

Easily the nicest homelab I’ve seen so far! Extremely jealous of the 14th gen servers!

[IanGSully]

That is quite a setup! By the way, this is the first video of yours that I have watched!

[Ahmed-gmli]

Awesome and amazing ^_^, please show us more and I need more to VSAN tutorials, I have HPE servers honestly G8 and G9 … you have amazing networking setup I would like to learn more in your future videos…. I watched your channel since long time ago I hope you get motivated to do more ^_^ videos. Have a great day ^^

[NahImPro]

Been waiting forever lol nice setup dude

[Joeron]

I'm really in love with homelab server racks with switches. Wow cool !!!. I'm from Colombian.

[TheJamice]

This is incredible for a house! My set up is 2 raspberry pis on permanently and 1 Dell R520 and 2 HP DL360 G7s which are powered on demand.

[tchnicolor]

It would be nice if you went into details e.g. how many VMs you are running on each host, and what each host is spec’d at, RAM and CPU wise. It would also be nice to see how it is all set up in vCenter and the rest of the software/networking side. Maybe you can do a screen recording and walk us through an overview of that.

[NegroRotary]

that's exactly what I'm waiting for, the how to videos

[tsteward]

Very nice DC. I wuld be interested in learning about how much power your using in the rack

[paulchao]

How you manage the power backyard, do you have standby generator?

[audioeptesicus]

Hey, Tommy! Great overview and impressive lab. I recently found your channel and blog and am working on doing similar. I've been revamping my setup and have 2 of those Arista DCS-7050QX-32S-R switches on the way (rear to front fans), as well as a Brocade ICX6450-48P to upgrade from my Ubiquiti 1GbE and 10GbE Edgeswitches. I also got my hands on a Dell MX7000 with 7x MX740c blades, and 2x MX9116n switches for the SmartFabric, all to replace my aging Supermicro 4-node FatTwin. If it wasn't for wanting to strictly run the SmartFabric on the MX9116n switches (losing layer 3 on them), I'd just run those chassis switches as my cores.

That said, I have a few questions for you:
- How picky are the Arista switches with DACs/Transceivers? I'm going to be using the 2x for redundancy, and was planning on bonding them with a port-channel and LACP, and each server will have a link to each switch.
- What exact model Mellanox ConnectX-4 cards did you go with for your R740s? I'm looking to upgrade my dual SFP+ Mellanox ConnectX-3 cards with dual QSFP+ 40Gb cards like what you have. Can all the Infiniband ConnectX-4 cards also do 40Gb ethernet?
- Can you go into detail on your cooling setup? My current rack is under my stairs and I'm unable to get the heat under sufficient control. I'm in Middle Tennessee and am moving my lab to the garage, as I have no where else to put a 42U cabinet. I had one out here previously, with no dedicated AC, and dust was unmanagable being in my 'workshop'. I'm planning on isolating and insulating it as best I can without building a full closet in there since it's not our forever home and plan to move in a couple years.
- What monitoring solution are you using for your environment?
- How many watts are you drawing in total nowadays?

If you're not already, the guys on r/homelab and r/homedatacenter would appreciate your videos and blog.

Thanks!

[bflnetworkengineer]

Tommy, how do you segment your vDS's between vSAN, iSCSI and data? eg. having 2 vDSs and be selective wich uplinks are used between distributed port groups or do you create a single vDS for each service? Thanks.

[AI-xijk]

I’d be very interested to see your cooling setup. I’ve noticed exhaust fan at the top and white soft walls perhaps to keep sound and air contained. At home there are options to take advantage of cold air in winter. Does it make sense to recirculate air always or just exhaust it outside? Tell us more how you did it. Thanks!

[sniffplays]

god damn now THATS a home lab! thats 1000% my dream home lab right there

[johnharrison]

I wish you would actually show up how you configured everything like from start to new in the VM, networking, VLAN, IP and etc.
I'm building my homelab environment and I been trying to find ideas and I like your environment but I wish you showed us how you did it.

[KathouQC]

Damn I not the only one with a lot of server at home aha last years I see the 2021 tour and I was starting with server and now I almost have a full 42u rack with r740xd r730xd and more, soon 40G swtich

[docskorpion]

Just curious what electrical circuits do you run for this rack of yours loaded with all these servers?