My Virtual Playground (Another Shuttle whitebox build)
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.
Hi,
I just bought myself a Netgear GS108E, although I’m thinking of returning it and getting a 108T like yours as it seems quite a bit more capable for a vLab. How’s it worked out for you? Any iSCSI or NFS traffic issues? Love to hear your feedback.
Thanks, Forbes.
Hi, I am so sorry I haven’t replied to now… and its probably too late, I don’t get many legitimate comments, and honestly don’t check as they are usually spam. In response to the question I haven’t had any problems with the GS108T, I’ve updated the lab to be running Hyper-V 3 at the moment as I need to work on my 2012 MCSA cert and no problems here either.
Again my apologies for not responding sooner.
I hope you lab is working well