Home Lab – Part Two

After a bit of mucking around I’ve managed to get VMware installed on my two home-brew servers.  The first server was completely straightforward and installed the latest version of ESXi6.5.  The second took the image, but on boot failed due to a lack of a network driver, with an error talking about nfs41client.  After a bit of googling I found an article showing how to resolve this by adding a network driver to ESXi6.5.  I followed the steps in the article and the host booted.  If anyone else has this problem please take a look at the great blog available here – http://www.computertechblog.com/adding-realtek-r8168-driver-to-an-esxi-6-0-iso/

Unfortunately my NAS, problematic little beast that it is, has decided that the HDDs in it are no longer useful, and has failed them.  I’m looking into this at the moment, however I think it is time to admit that the iomega needs to go the way of the Dodo.  I’m going to attempt to fix it this week.  One last chance…

IT Home Lab – Back to Physical

I live in Perth WA (Western Australia), and work in IT.  Perth is a beautiful place and as per the posts about my trip to the far North West of the state, it is pretty vast area, and largely untouched.  This is one of the reasons I love living here, however it brings me to the tyranny of distance.  My work lab is in Sydney, and due to the sometimes flaky internet connection I have at home, this can cause me problems in access and working in the lab.  So I’ve decided to build my home lab from the odd bits and pieces that I have picked up over the years.  The point of the lab is to run an environment that will allow me to deploy new software and see how it goes.  The first step though is to build it from scratch.

Back to Physical

The physical components of the lab are essentially old bits of kit that I’ve had lying around for years, cobbled together on a shoestring budget.

Every IT environment is made up the same core components, Storage, Compute, and Network, with additional components such as the rack it is all in, UPS, physical security and so on.  As this is a home lab I’ll be focussing on the core components, and will outline the future growth plans in a later article. Continue reading “IT Home Lab – Back to Physical”