The New Lab: A brief overview!

calendar Apr 6, 2025 · 4 min read  ·
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Hi,

This post is all about what my lab currently looks like on April 3rd, 2025 and why I made the decision to rent two relatively powerful dedicated servers instead of building out a cluster.

To get the boring part out of the way, the reason is because it's easier to spend a bit extra per month than to purchase two servers that cost thousands of euros each, as that would take forever to save up for in my current situation.

It does come with its own challenges and things to consider. For example, there's the site-to-site VPN that must be created. In my case, it's routing based with BGP between my home and the three remote servers. Luckily for me, BGP isn't new to me as it's also used for me to able to announce my public /24 subnet and as my previous lab was in a local datacenter, I also have experience with setting up VPNs from that. The reason I chose route-based over policy-based is because I keep adding/removing VLANs and NSX networks, and otherwise I have to spend extra time setting up a tunnel if it's policy based, with BGP, it just propagates which is much easier.

Below are some diagrams I created to help visualize the setup better:

An image showing a network layout with two ESXi hosts with its workloads, a remote Debian 12 server for production workloads, a remote backup server and a home networking setup, all connected through VPNs with BGP.

What hardware am I running? Here is a list of the hardware:

Ava:

  • 1x AMD EPYC 7502P 32-core
  • 12x 64GB DDR4 (768GB total)
  • 1x 3.84TB NVMe SSD

Lena:

  • 1x AMD EPYC 7502P 32-core
  • 12x 64GB DDR4 (768GB total)
  • 1x 3.84TB NVMe SSD
  • 2x 1.92TB NVMe SSD

Niko:

  • 1x AMD Ryzen 3600 6-core
  • 2x 32GB DDR4 (64GB total)
  • 2x 512GB NVMe SSD

Angela:

  • 1x AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
  • 2x 32GB ECC DDR4 (64GB total)
  • 1x 1TB NVMe SSD
  • 4x 22TB HDD

Veronica:

  • 1x AMD Ryzen 5950X 16-core
  • 4x 32GB DDR4 (128GB total)
  • 2x 2TB NVMe SSD

Mira:

  • 1x Intel Core i7 8700k 6-core
  • 2x 16GB DDR4 (32GB total)
  • 1x 512GB NVMe SSD

This is what it looks like in vCenter:

a vSphere cluster overview in vCenter, showing 159.68 GHz of CPU capacity and 1.5TB of memory capacity.

As you can see, there are two very beefy ESXi hosts that run the majority of the lab. For example, this is an example of what each host runs

Ava:

  • Nested Cloud Foundation lab

Lena:

  • vCenter Server Appliance
  • Aria Operations
  • Aria Automation
  • Nested vSphere lab with NSX
  • Data Services Manager
  • MinIO
  • Authentik
  • Checkmk
  • Docker containers
  • ..and more

Niko:

  • Email server
  • Web server

Angela:

  • Unraid for storage

Veronica:

  • Nothing at the moment (using it as a temporary machine for streaming/recording)

Mira:

  • Testing machine for the physical networking labs I make, usually turned off

Now you might wonder what I do with all these services, I will try to explain.

My Cloud Foundation lab is to tinker around and learn Cloud Foundation further. I recently got my VCP-VCF 5.2 certification which I'm very happy with. This nested lab helped me a bit with getting the certification. Aria Operations has been deployed so to keep track of resource usage, and allows me to easily rightsize (= adjust resources) for virtual machines in case they are under- or overprovisioned. I use Aria Automation to deploy certain applications for testing and have been trying to get on-demand nested vSphere labs to work with this, but that's for another post. I also use this to deploy other basic applications on their own NSX segment running in a dedicated nested vSphere lab. The reason for this is that with the way the physical servers with Hetzner are connected, I cannot deploy NSX directly to the physical hardware, so the dedicated nested vSphere lab is a workaround. Data Services Manager runs a couple of MySQL databases for my projects, should I need one (and also, as usual, more learning and getting familiar with DSM).

Authentik and Checkmk (that I picked from the long list of other things) and some apps are there purely to make logging in and monitoring easier. I won't list everything as otherwise it will be a very long blog post.

In terms of the physical networking labs I do, I have this laying around at the moment that I actively use:

  • 1x Arista 7050SX
  • 3x Arista 7010T
  • 2x Palo Alto PA-220

In storage I have a few EdgeRouters, EdgeSwitches and a bunch of older servers that I currently do not use.

Let me know if you want to learn more about my lab, for example a couple of more in-depth YouTube videos, or if you have any questions, feel free to send me an email or get in touch through one of the socials.

Thank you for reading this all if you got this far, and have a great rest of your day!