My Home Lab Setup

The HomeLab BOM:

1. Intel NUC 10 (Frost Canyon i5):

• Processor: 10th Gen Intel Frost Canyon- 1.6 GHz, 4core, 8 Thread

• Ram: 2x16GB DDR4 RAM (Crucial)

• Crucial SSD (120GB)

• Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe SSD (500GB)

• OS Media: Kingston DT 32GB USB Drive

• OS: ESXi 7.0.2

Note: The Intel NUCs are not officially supported by VMware. It must not be used in a production environment. However, the NUC makes for a good ESXi host in Home Lab environments where space, electricity and cost are constraints. Refer the site: "https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php" to get a list of hardware supported in production environment.

2. WD MyCloud EX2 Ultra NAS (2 Bay)

• 2x 1TB WD NAS Storage Disk

• iSCSI capable NAS

Note: The WD EX2 Ultra is not officially supported by VMware. It must not be used in a production environment. This NAS is a good starting point for testing and exploring different NAS options supported by ESXi. Refer the site: "https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php" to get a list of hardware supported in production environment.

3. Raspberry PI 4B (8GB):

• Arm Cortex processor

• 8GB RAM

• OS Media: SanDisk USB 32GB

• OS: ESXi-ARM Fling v1.3. This is a VMware Fling release and should not be used in production environment. I will be putting up a post on installation and configuration of ESXi-Arm on raspberry pi, where we will discuss this in more details.

You might have noticed, lot of this hardware is not official VMware supported hardware; but that is the point of a home lab. You get to understand, get acquainted to new releases and test different configurations and setups; which might not always be possible in a production environment. The other advantage of a home lab is it gives you 24 hours access to a test environment which can help you in preparing for certifications like the VCP-DCV.

We will be discussing in more details on the configurations and hardware selection criterion for these hardware in future blog posts.