The Synology DS1512 has been a popular choice for many home labs in recent years. I hoped that the company’s raft of recent product updates would reach this model eventually. Well my wish was granted as Synology have announced the DS1513+.
There are a few modifications to note. The one that stands out the most at first glance is the doubling of LAN capability. The DS1513+ boasts no fewer than 4 RJ45 ports. That does seem like quite a lot. It does open up some interesting possibilities though…
Since we have a small but significant following of people who run home labs here on vSpecialist, I thought I’d mention a limited offer that may be of interest.
If you’re not familiar with AutoLab, it’s designed to produce a nested vSphere 5.1, 5.0 or 4.1 lab environment with minimum effort. Prebuilt Open Source VMs and the shell of other VMs are used along with automation for the installation of operating systems and applications into these VMs with the end result being a useful home lab that you can stand up from scratch in a short amount of time.
Anyway, it’s possible to get an AutoLab setup and running in the cloud and BareMetalCloud actually offer it as a service. Mike Laverick has some discount codes available (use MAGICMIKE100) to the first 100 people to take up the service. Check out his post on the topic for more details and help on getting started.
Having recently relocated my home office and my home lab within my house, I have set about rebuilding my lab from scratch. As it evolves or my needs change, a rebuild is good to purge out the remnants of the various experiments and tests that I’ve done. However, I will sometimes fall into the trap of trying to be too clever.
Take last night as an example. I happened to read about a piece of software called Cobbler. To save anyone having to read what is quite a lengthy man page, Cobbler manages the provisioning of operating systems from a single server. I thought it would be great if I could automate and control the complete rebuild of my entire lab from bare metal to fully functional at the touch of a few buttons with my QNAP NAS acting as the Cobbler server.
After a little more research, I grabbed the source code and tried to shoe-horn it onto my NAS. Part way through, and encountering problems, I realized that I was vastly over-complicating this rebuild. Let’s face it, how many times do I actually need to reinstall everything from the ground up? Once or maybe twice per major release at most.
Thankfully I only wasted an evening on it although it was fun. I might still try and work it out in the future but there are more important things to do in the meantime.
So, time to update the home labs information, and yes, this time I may have overdone it a little in one or two areas.
I spend most of Sunday rebuilding my home lab (christened some time ago as vSpecialistlabs v2), adding some elements, changing and tweeking some hardware, and removing other hardware I wasn’t using at the time.
Essentially, I’ve ended-up with a home lab that comprises the following aspects:
Below is a picture of my home lab set-up, and you can immediately see where I may have gone OTT – screens! For some reason, I love to have screen real estate.
The components of the lab / set-up are as follows:
I will add more information about how the lab grows and is configured – especially in the light of required revision for updating my VCAP certification to v5. Things to note:
In the meantime, please feel free to ask questions or comment on my set-up, I’m always looking for ways to improve!
I’m not convinced that this is supported, but it did work. As with anything on a blog, use at your own risk.
I was working on rebuilding my home lab and wanted to clear down the host that my vCenter VM was sitting on. Before doing that I wanted to rescue some files from it (long story). For some reason it hung on me and wouldn’t respond so I tried to reset it. This process got as far as 95% and then got stuck 
One way to unstick such a VM is to SSH onto the hosts that it’s running on and use the vm-support command. How?
Run “vm-support -x” to show the world IDs of the running VMs on the host:
The one that I wanted was 9190. Using “vm-support -X 9190″ and answering “y” to the three questions that follow will, eventually, result in you getting control back of the VM without affecting anything else. Just remember, try it at your own risk 
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