Hey, I got lucky and someone said he will buy me a machine. But since I already have a good notebook for my actual webdev work, maybe I should set up a homelab for fun and semi-professional stuff.

But I have no deep knowledge of proper hardware.

tldr: Is this hardware combination stupid or ok in general for running vSphere8?

I tried to read a lot, but I still wanted to ask you all, if there are some major flaws/oversights with what is clicked together here.
What I would use it for:

  • learning and running vSphere 8/esxi
  • simulating multiple Windows Clients, Windows Networks with AD, and some other VMs to learn and apply some security stuff. Did lots of Cybersecurity CTFs but now I think I should do something “real”.
  • learn and setup pipelines for CI/CD and get more proficient with things like terraform, ansible, etc. in more complex environment
  • this machine would not need to run 24/7

-- Hardware –

Some things here are very unspecific. That is because I kinda need to get everything from one shop and this german shop seems accessible. They also claim to check your order for compatibility before purchase: link to shop
It may be more pricey and I don’t want to waste money but until now this is not a deal breaker.

Plattform: Dell PowerEdge R730

  • 8xLFF 3.5"
  • 2U
  • Intel Socket R3 (LGA 2011-3)
  • 2 CPU Slots
  • 24 DIMM-Slots, max. 2.400 MT/s

Processor: 1x Intel Xeon E5-2698v4 (2.2 GHz/20-core/50MB/135 W)

There is no particular reason for this CPU besides the mentioned 20 cores and as far as I understood is has to be v4 for vSphere8. This is the only result on vmware vSphere8 compatibility: link

I found some comments that said E5-2695v4 would be better and cheaper but I could not find it in a shop.

Memory: 4x 32 GB DDR4 RAM

128 GB seems to be quite a lot for now.

Drives:

  • 2x Dell 400GB 3.5" SATA 6G Mixed Use SSD
  • 2x Dell 8TB 7.2k 3,5" SATA 6G HDD

Probably 2x RAID1. I figured I could use 3.5" to 2.5" adapters if i really need 2.5" drives later on.

PSU: 1x Dell 750 W AC Hot Plug Power Supply

Options are: 495W, 750W or 1100W. 750W seemed to be the reasonable middle

Host-Bus-Adapter: none

Do I really need an HBA in the beginning?

RAID Controller: Dell PERC H730

I do not really need RAID, but I thought I would need either a HBA or a RAID Controller?

PCIe Network Adapter: Dell Intel Ethernet I350-T4 4x1000Base-T

From the 6 adapters I can choose, this seems to be the most basic one with 4 slots. Only information I could online find was “dont buy the fake ones” which I think wont be the case.

Network Daughter Card: none

Proper Networking has to come later, so i skipped this for now.

It would help me a lot if you can give me some advice if this setup is kinda reasonable or if I need to dive into hardware way deeper.

Ultimately I am more interested in the virtualization and software side of this all, but I know I cant skip the hardware :)

  • dude_12345@alien.topOPBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Hey, thanks for the info!
    It will either be in my “office” which is quite noisy already and if it is still too loud, the server will go into a more or less dedicated room yes.

    Does the bad power efficiency come from all hardware being quite old or from some specific part combo I chose?