Recently I made few hardware and software upgrades to my homelab setup. I am calling it as my Homelab v2 as it seems like my homelab has come a long way from when I had first set it up. This is what the first version of my homelab looked like: https://www.virtualmystery.info/post/my-home-lab-setup
As my curiosity and hence interests expanded, I wanted to practice and develop skills on containers, virtual networks and cyber analysis (Pen-testing). Luckily for me, my fundamental skills of virtualization and ESXi meant that deploying setups for learning these unexplored domains was not an uphill task.
Let us take a look at my update home lab network setup and the BOM:
My homelab bom (2022):
1. Intel NUC 10 i5(1):
Ram: 48GB
ESXi : 7.0u3F
Host name: Nuclab.virmyst.homelab
Storage:
150 GB SATA SSD
500GB NVMe SSD
Virtual Machines hosted:
1- Tanzu Community Edition BootStrap VM
2- Tanzu CE Management Cluster
3- Tanzu CE Worker Cluster
4- NSX-Edge Node1 -- For Firewall and Homelab WAN router
2. Intel NUC 10 i5(2):
Ram: 32GB
ESXi: 7.0u3f
Hostname: Nuclab2.virmyst.homelab
Storage:
500GB NVMe
Virtual Machines hosted:
1- vCenter 7.0u3e
2- NSX-T Manager 3.2
3. Intel NUC 11 i3(1):
Ram: 32GB
ESXi: 7.0u3f
Hostname: Nuclab3.virmyst.homelab
Storage:
500GB NVMe
250GB SSD
Virtual Machines hosted:
1- ADDS
2- EdgeNode-2 (For creating micro-segment for pentest setup)
3- LinuxVictim
4- Win7Victim
5- KaliLinux VM
4. Cisco CBS 350 managed switch:
8 ports managed switch (+2 Uplink Ports)
Features in use:
VLAN
RSTP
QoS
SNMP
Syslog notifications
5. RPI 4B 8GB: ESXi-Arm
Ram: 8GB
Hostname: RPI1.vimyst.homelab
Storage:
32GB USB drive
6. WD NAS 2-Bay
Storage:
1TB HDD
Services:
iSCSI initiator
SMB share for Backups
7. Synology DS120j
Storage:
500GB SSD
Services:
Iscsi initiator
PXE server
NTP server
8. RPI 4B (4GB)
OS: RPI OS
RAM: 4GB
This Raspberry Pi is intended for testing Grafana and other open source monitoring services.
9. D-Link 16 port Unmanaged Switch
10. TP-Link Wifi AP
11. DLINK Wifi repeater- to extend the home internet to my homelab
I will be discussing in more details on my pentest and micro-segmentation setup in the upcoming posts. I have already shared a post on my TCE deploy in this post: https://www.virtualmystery.info/post/deploy-tanzu-community-edition-v0-11-using-linux-boostrap-vm-part-1 . I will be using my K8s cluster for setting up NSX-T Application Platform, which I will be discussing in my upcoming posts. Stay tuned!