¶ BluSphere Homelab Wiki
¶ About Me
I'm a professional services consultant with VMware. This is the introduction to my homelab. This page covers all the developments and future plans for the homelab including all the services, hardware changes and upgrades.
For more information about me you can visit this site
¶ Hardware
The BluSphere homelab is run on Dell R730 Servers. The current cluster is small with only 2 servers, but with a rackspace of 42Us, there's way more space to expand the lab for a variety of use cases
¶ Compute
The compute of the homelab runs on ESXi 7.0 on Dell's Poweredge R730
- 2 x Intel Xeon 2650v4
- 128GB DDR4 ECC RAM
¶ Network
The networking on the homelab is handelled with a Ubiquiti router and a switch. As home users are also using the same network, VLANs are configured to seperate home users and IOT devices from the homelab. Applications and workloads on the homelabs are also separated into VLANs
¶ Ubiquiti Dream Machine Special Edition
Selected for its ability to do 2.5G and 10G WAN for future expandability with higher speed WAN connections. The ability for powering PoE access points off the switch is also appealing, but for now the access points are connected to the switch
¶ Ubiquiti Enterprise 24 PoE
2.5G ports on the switch allows for home users to connect to higher speed networks. PoE allows for APs to be connected without having to install additional power outlets for the APs. When the storage appliance is added, another switch will have to be added to add high speed connectivity for storage.
Future plans to add 25G/10G networking to utilise higher speed storage is in the works
¶ Storage
Currently, the homelab was designed and built with limited budget. As a result there was no remote storage. VMFS datastores are directly attached to the servers and in RAID1 configuration handled by the PERC H730.
¶ Expansion/Plan
A TrueNAS Scale storage solution is in the works to provide block and file storage to the lab and users. Another Poweredge Gen14 / Proliant Gen10 will be added with addtional drives to form the storage appliance
¶ Rack Diagram
¶ Services and Applications
Compute servers are running ESXi 7.0 u3. Both servers are clustered and managed with a vCenter Server. vRealize Operations(vROps) and vRealize Log Insights(vRLI) are used to monitor and collect logs for the envrionment.
Planned storage appliance will run TrueNAS Scale
Webservers are also avaible on the vSphere cluster. However as to not expose ports 80 and 443 to the internet, these services sit behind a cloudflare tunnel. Access to other services such as vCenter and vRLI and vROps are not exposed in anyway and will require a VPN connection
¶ Network Topology
Networks are divided by VLANs
- Home User
- IOT
- ESXi Management and Infrastructure
- vMotion
- VM Traffic
- Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Workload
A detailed run through on the network is provided HERE