I strongly believe that everyone needs a home lab in order to practice Continual Improvement of the self. I recently completed an upgrade of my own home lab, for those interested. This year’s upgrade was inspired partly by need after moving to a new house that lacked ethernet wiring and partly by Chris Wahl’s colorful network.

The Existing Lab

For the past years, my focus has truly been on virtualizing everything. The core of my lab are two Dell hosts running vSphere. The smaller is a 2012 PowerEdge T110 ii with a 4 core processor, 32 GB RAM (32 GB max), a single onboard NIC, and some local storage. The larger is a 2013 PowerEdge T320 with a 6 core processor, 32 GB RAM (96 GB max), dual onboard NICs, and some local storage. They are both single socket, but could take extra NICs or storage. The T320 could also have an iDRAC if I didn’t mind running downstairs once in a blue moon. They are currently running vSphere 5.5 and I will upgrade them in the next month or so.

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