My Virtual Playground

Having moved back to Australia from the UK, and deciding to start getting serious about virtualization, the only reasonable thing to do was put together a home lab… My Virtual Playground.  After reading about possible set-ups of many others I decided the Shuttle whitebox would be my best option.  The plan is to have a self building test platform which I can throw together from scratch using various PowerShell scripts, PXE installs etc, I’m not sure how successful this will be, but either way I should learn a lot while trying.  As the build comes together I’ll add more and more info on what I have done, and how I’ve done it.  The community for vmware has been so fantastic to me since I started working with vSphere, its time to give something back.

The Purchases –

2x Shuttle SH67H3 bare bones boxes

2x Intel i5-2500s @3.30GHz

4x 8GB DDR3 RAM

2x Intel Dual Port nics (PT, I read that the ET if much better, but for my budget and setup the PT should be more than adequate)

2x 4GB USB Memory Sticks

Netgear GS108T

Thecus 4200eco (support iSCSI, NFS, CIFS, etc)

2x Seagate 1TB HDD’s, raid 5 in the Thecus

Currently the machine are all hooked up, there is still some networking LACP etc to be configured, which I’ll provide more details on later.