1. Inexpensive Home Lab
James Kane
Mark Minasi Forum Meeting April 2009 Support Consultant - Strategic Thought Group

2. Introduction
Creating an inexpensive home lab
 About myself
 Requirements
 Challenge
 My research
 The server build
 Advantages
 Risks
 Insights

3. About Myself
 James Kane
 I post on the Minasi forum as username chamezzzz
 Member of the forum since 2002
 Work for the Strategic Thought Group
 Where I provide Technical Support and Administration

4. Requirements
 Inexpensive
– We are in a global recession
 Scalable
– The hardware can be expanded
 Robust
– Build a variety of environments
 Replication
– Especially problems encountered at my work place

5. Challenge
 I wanted to use VMware ESXi
 As I use this extensively in my workplace, however......
 Supported hardware is expensive

6. My Research
 Performed my research Google searches
 Found the following website, which is the inspiration for this presentation
 http://www.techhead.co.uk
 Run by a New Zealander named Simon Seagrave
 Who is based in London
 He is also a VMware vExpert & VMware Certified Professional

7. Server Build
 Hardware
– HP Proliant ML115 Server
– AMD 2.1GHz Opteron Quad Core
– 1 x 1Gb NIC £150
– 8GB Kingston Memory (4 x 2GB) £135
– 2GB USB Memory Stick £5
 Software
– VMware ESXi Server £0
– WinRAR £21
– DD for Windows £0
 Total Expenditure £311

8. Server Build
 Process
– Download VMWare ESXi iso image
– Extract the Hypervisor using WinRAR
– Write the Hypervisor to the USB drive using DD for
Windows

9. Advantages
 Scalable
- add Network Cards, Layer 2 Switch and iSCSI storage
 Cost
- advantages of Enterprise Virtualization at reduced cost
 Flexible
- not constrained by 8GB Memory

10. Advantages

11. Advantages

12. Advantages

13. Advantages

14. Risks
 Support
– HP Proliant ML115 hardware is not supported by VMware
 Redundancy
– There is none in my presented setup and all of my eggs are in one basket
 RAID
– ML115 cannot use the onboard RAID to RAID more than 2 disks.
– For disk redundancy a VMware ESXi supported controller such as the HP e200 controller
is required (supports RAID 0,1 and 5) with SATA disks.

15. Insights
 BIOS Settings
– Set boot device to USB
– Ensure to enable ‘Secure Virtual Machine Mode’
 Direct Disk extraction requires attention
 HP Insight Agents will not work on this server (they only work on the HP
Proliant 300 series of servers and higher)