Home Lab Build: vSpecialistLabs v2

January 14, 2013 by 1 Comment

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:

  • Multi-site VM configuration, with multi-host clusters at both sites.
  • iSCSI shared storage for main ‘production’ site.
  • vSphere Replication to backup ‘DR’ site.
  • Managed networking.

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.

overview

The components of the lab / set-up are as follows:

  1. Servers:
    1. Server 1: IBM S5520HC chassis with 2 x E5520 2.26GHz, 24GB RAM, 1TB SATA, H/W iSCSI & Dual 1GB NICs.
    2. Server 2: As server 1 above.
    3. Server 3: HP NL35l MicroServer with 8GB RAM.
    4. Server 4: As server 3 above.
    5. Main PC. Desktop PC from Servers Plus. (Updated range can be found here). Intel i7-2700 Quad core @ 3.50GHz, 32GB RAM, 2 x OCZ Vertex 4 SSDs and 2TB SATA, X64 Windows 7 Pro. Eizo CE210W (main monitor) plus Dell E177FP (second monitor).
  2. Storage:
    1. 8 TB QNAP 459 Pro II NAS. (4 x 2TB drives in 2 RAIDs).
    2. Iomega external 1TB USB/FW disk.
  3. Networking:
    1. HP 1910-16G Managed gigabit switch.
    2. HP 1410-8G Un-managed gigabit switch.
  4. Accessories:
    1. Belkin Soho 4-port VGA KVM, with bluetooth USB keyboard – for all servers.

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:

  • The cabling is far from finished! I’m still on connectivity at the moment – looking pretty is next phase.
  • Power configuration is top of the list. Running this from multi-plugs is not ideal (at least they aren’t daisy-chained!) The servers and PCs are all connected to surge protector PDUs.
  • For my PC, iMac and laptops I use Synergy across all clients for a single KVM view. For the servers, I use the Belkin KVM and separate keyboard.
  • I’m not a specific network focused bod, but I am looking at expanding the lab in the near future into the Cisco arena, for CCENT certification and beyond.

In the meantime, please feel free to ask questions or comment on my set-up, I’m always looking for ways to improve!

Filed Under: Fun, Hardware, Lab, Networking, Storage, VMware, vSpecialistLabsv2, vSphere Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Configuring QNAP for VMware iSCSI

August 15, 2012 by 5 Comments

As part of the vSpecialistLabv2 set-up, I recently purchased a QNAP 459 Pro II NAS, with the purpose if connecting it via iSCSI to the physical and virtual hosts in the rest of the lab.

The main part of the configuration of this device is to configure the QNAP storage for iSCSI for use with ESXi.

Pre-requisites:

  • Do the basic set-up of the QNAP device, using the configuration wizard. (See the QNAP manual).
  • Assign the network information to the device, and ascertain successful basic network connectivity. (See the QNAP manual).
  • Update the firmware to the latest version. (Easiest way is to use the auto-update feature in the admin GUI). (This how-to was done using firmware 3.7.3 Build 20120801).

Process:

1) Connect-to and login via the QNAP GUI with admin credentials.

2) Under Home menu on left, select ‘Disk Management’ then ‘iSCSI’.

3) On the ‘Portal Management’ tab, enable the ‘iSCSI Target Service’, leave the port number as default.

4) Select the ‘Target Management’ tab.

5) Click the ‘Quick Configuration Wizard’ button.

6) Select ‘iSCSI Target with mapped LUN’.

7) Click Next to confirm the wizard actions.

8) Give the target name and target alias names consistent with the environment. (In this example, I’m using ‘vsldatastore04′). The target IQN will be completed automatically.

9) CHAP. Because this is a lab and I’m not using CHAP authentication yet, this is blank. Click Next.

10) Choose the LUN allocation, LUN name, disk allocation, and LUN size. (I’m choosing thin provisioning, LUN name – consistent with target name and alias above, and 1TB size).

11) Confirm the settings required, click Next to create the LUN. When complete, click Finish to return to the GUI. Under the iSCSI list, the new LUN should be now listed with the status as ‘Ready’.

This is the end of the QNAP part of the connection. Now we need to configure each ESXi host (I’m using vCenter 5 and ESXi 5) to connect to the new iSCSI LUN.

1) Connect to your vCenter server using vSphere client with admin credentials.

2) Select the ESXi host, then select Configuration tab / storage adapters. If this is the first time you are using an iSCSI connection for this host, you may need to add a software adapter for your host. To do this, click the Add… link, then select iSCSI software adapter. Once added, it should appear under the Storage Adapters.

3) You may also need to enable the storage adapter. Select the iSCSI adapter from the list, then click Properties. If the adapter reports as Disabled, enable it by clicking Configure then checking the Enable box. Click OK to confirm.

4) There are 2 ways to configure iSCSI discovery – dynamic and static. We shall be using the dynamic method. On the configure screen, select the Dynamic Discovery tab. Click Add to add an additional iSCSI host. This will be the IP address of the NAS server (mine is 192.168.1.10). Use the port number defined in QNAP config. step 3 above – 3260 if you left it as default. As I mentioned before, I’m not using CHAP so this was left un-configured.

5) Confirm that the iSCSI server has been added, by checking the new server is listed.

6) I now usually rescan the storage adapters, but this isn’t always a required step. To do this, click Rescan All to rescan for new storage devices and VMFS volumes.

7) Select the Configuration / Storage option. Select Add Storage.

8) Select add Disk / LUN. Click Next. (Ignore the other option for NFS).

9) Select the iSCSI target from the list of available storage. If all has been configured correctly above, your new LUN should appear in the list. You can see in the example the IQN for the iSCSI target includes the datastore / target name specified above, in this case ‘vsldatastore04′. Select the new LUN, click Next.

10) Choose the VMFS version you require for this datastore. As I only have vSphere 5 in the lab, I’ll be using VMFS-5.

11) Confirm the settings applied, click Next.

12) Name the datastore. Give it the consistent name (vsldatastore04 in the example).

13) Select the capacity required (if different from default LUN size). Click Next.

14) Confirm the layout of the LUN options, click Finish to complete the configuration.

15) The new LUN is now available to the host. This process needs to be repeated for all ESXi hosts in the cluster to maintain a consistent configuration. Either this can be done manually by repeating the defined steps above, or can be configured using Host Profiles if your licensing permits. The LUN can also be included in a datastore cluster (version permitting), or used as a standalone vSphere datastore.

Filed Under: Howto, Storage, Virtualization, VMware, vSpecialistLabsv2 Tagged With: , ,

Home Lab Build: vSpecialistLabsv2 Overview

August 14, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Now that I’ve moved jobs and consequently lost access to all the toys that constituted the original vSpecialistLabs, I am starting a rebuild project with vSpecialistLabsv2! This will be entirely hosted as a true ‘home lab’ (i.e. not in a DC), and will be the basis of my lab testing for the foreseeable future.

I wasn’t very dilligent in documenting my last lab (the original vSpecialistLabs), due to a little thing called my job! That’s the problem with labs based at a place of work – they tend to be used for active projects and development. The new vSpecialistLabsv2 is different though, as I will be using this not only for testing, reviewing and learning, but as a true sandbox environment that I can and will several times over build, burn then rebuild.

Also, in a change to the last vSpecialistLabs posts, I’m going to be less structured about how I document the lab, as I realised that saving up lots of information into a single post quickly becomes unmanageable and hence less likely to get done. That said, I will cover topics such as:

  • Lab Hardware
  • Lab Networking
  • Storage
  • Configuration
  • Testing Information
  • On-going Projects
Hopefully some will find this useful, if you are considering building a home lab to test or enhance your virtualisation skills – my aim of these posts is not just to document my own lab but to provide pointers to others so avoiding some of the common pitfalls. Enjoy! 
Filed Under: Lab, vSpecialistLabsv2 Tagged With:

Home Lab Build: vSpecialistLabsv2 Hardware

August 14, 2012 by 5 Comments

Choosing your home lab hardware can and will be a trade-off between many factors. Capacity, speed / performance, cost, intended use and physical space available all play a part in considerations for what you want vs. what you can get away with for your home lab. There are also some other factors that are maybe less obvious to consider too, like noise, power draw and what your wife says you can put in the home office! As I said before, it’s all a trade-off, but here’s what I decided on.

1) Compute Power.

For the compute power, I went for a split approach. I’ve always advocated running ESXi on bare metal tin where you can (although you can run it as a nested VM given the right hardware), so I decided to split my compute power between physical and virtual ESXi. Why? Flexibility and cost. Being able to move instances around the lab will be useful in the future, but ultimately it comes down to cost. Physical hardware is expensive and consumes power. So, I went for:

  • 2 x HP ProLiant MicroServer N36L servers, each with dual-core AMD processors and a local 250GB drive and an ESXi-compatible USB key fitted internally. I picked these up really cheaply (£45 each) from a popular auction site, and for the money you can’t really go wrong. They may only have 2 cores and a maximum of 8GB RAM (2 x 4GB), but they punch above their weight in home labs and offer good expansion options for local storage and via PCI, a DVD drive, USB and eSATA ports and on-board gigabit LAN. (The updated bigger brother of this server is the ProLiant N40L, which HP and resellers are almost constantly offering cashback offers on!)
  • ServersPlus Business PC. Again, here you can’t really go wrong. The linked version is the updated version (slightly more expensive too) of the one I got, but essentially the highlights are: 16GB RAM (max. 32GB supported by the motherboard I have), Intel i7-2700k with 8 logical processors and OEM Windows 7 64-bit for £600. Upgrades to the standard spec I got were: 1) Maxing the RAM with a 32GB kit (8Gb x 4 DDR3 DIMMs) from Crucial UK for £340, 2) 1 x OCZ Vertex 3 64GB SSD for OS / applications + 1 x OCZ Vertex 4 128GB SSD for ‘local’ VMs, both from eBuyer for £55 and £90 respectively, and 3) a dual-SSD drive caddy from Overclockers for about £5.

2) Networking.

For networking, I decided to take the easy route. I already have a decent home router that connects us to the interweb, so I decided to piggyback off this for the lab. The router has 4 x 1GB LAN ports, so extending this was easy. The only addition to the networking was:

  • HP ProCurve 1410-8G switch, £45 from eBuyer. This is a dumb layer-2 8-port gigabit switch that’s essentially plug-and-play. Simply plug-in the cables from the various devices and away you go. No configuration necessay either connecting it to the router – router port 1 to switch port 1 via a standard cat-5 cable is all you need. All the rest of the kit in the lab connects to this switch, then goes to the router as needed. (More on this in a lab networking post). To be honest, this will be first thing I will upgrade – simply from a capacity and management perspective when I want to start labbing vLANs etc, but it does fine for now.

3) Storage.

I went a bit mad on the storage specification for the lab, going for capacity and decent performance. In the end, I went for:

  • QNAP TS-459 Pro 2 (about £650). This is a good but expensive choice, but ultimately worth the investment. Highlights of the specs include official VMware HCL support, multiple 1GB NICs, multipath support, iSCSI support, replication and hosts of other features. I installed 2 x 3TB Seagate Barracuda SATA 7.2k and 2 x 2TB Seagate Barracuda SATA 7.2k drives to make a total raw capacity of 10TB. Drives were a maximum of £100 each, but fluctuate in price wildly, so if you are looking for drives, go with what’s best and cheapest at the time! (More on this in a lab storage post).

4) Accessories.

Just having a computer, switch and a NAS is never the full story when putting it all together. To complete the hardware section, here is a list of ‘bits’ I also purchased or used for the lab:

  • Eizo CE210W monitor. One I already had and am re-using, but a good one because it has multiple DVI inputs.
  • A USB hub, to connect multiple devices to the PC via the desk (I hate training wires).
  • A DVI switch (because the monitor doesn’t have enough DVI inputs!
  • Multiple DVI-VGA cables (a couple of pounds each from a popular auction site).
  • Cat-5 patch cables. DON’T go to PC World to buy these (you don’t need to pay £8.99 or something for a single 1m patch cable) – get them online and cheap instead.
  • Spare keyboard and mouse. If you don’t have a decent KVM, having a spare keyboard and mouse means you can quickly move around physical kit without much grief. Make sure it’s USB though…
  • Freecom 1TB USB external drive. Useful for one touch backups, and for moving big stuff between hardware – especially useful during set-up.

So, there you have it – a quick run down of the hardware I’ll be using in the new vSpecialistLabsv2 set-up. As I go on, I’ll add more posts on the configuration of all this.

Any questions, please ask!

Filed Under: Hardware, Lab, vSpecialistLabsv2 Tagged With: , , , , , ,