At the time of writing the choice went for the ability to segregate different types of traffic and create a sandbox environment for testing vSAN and vVOL among other things. The purpose is to get the VMware home lab closer to a real deployment. Moving from an existing setup based on the Intel NUC 6i5 series + Netgear GS108 v3 and Synology DS416 and DS916 which has been working great for the last three years, the idea is to add a level of sophistication. The purpose is to create an affordable environment serving as a sandbox for learning and improving main setup in real production environments.
These are only a few of the topics this article series will touch upon when it comes down to a VMware home lab.
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Features like VLANs, LAGs, custom firewall rules, software defined storage, traffic separation and a lot more. The main idea is to leverage all the new hardware and the nice software features generally used in the enterprise or large deployments. What is the intended purpose for the new setup? The goal is to provide easy step by step articles with simple screenshots from start to finish and use this article as a sort of placeholder for all future links and updates. Synology DS620Slim, DS916 and DS416 series.
pfSense 2.4.x (and above) as virtual router for Intra-VLAN segmentation, firewall, routing and more.TP-Link T2600G-18TS Network Switches (2x used for PROD and DR).VMware 6.7 U3b and above (current release at the time of writing).In this instance the aim is to create a new article series focusing on the following: It’s a New Year and why not start building a new VMware home lab? Based on a previous home lab experience with 4x Netgear GS108v3 managed switches for the Networking side of things, this setup is instead using a slightly different physical and logical topology.