Home labs

After not having a proper lab for years I decided to splurge out and get one so I can do some learning and reduce my collection of old mac minis and headless laptops.

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There were a few requirements

Had to be on premise
Small and portable
Low power consumption
Run ESXi

I wanted something local that I could leave running without incuring costs, but I also wanted to be able to take it around with me as I travel a bit. a 2RU used server would use far too much power and be a pain to get shipped here or take around with me.

A micro PC was the best way to go there’s a few good options out there such as

Intel NUC 9 Extreme
Intel NUC 10 i7
HP Z2 Mini G4
Mac Mini

In the end I chose the NUC10 i7 with 64GB or RAM and a 2TB SSD as it was the best performance for the price, small, and very low power consumption.

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Setup was pretty straight forward, I installed my RAM, m2 SSD, the Ultra fit USB. Put the ESX image on a USB for installation, I did have to modify my ESX image to add in a NIC driver.

You could follow this full guide if you need instructions on how to install ESXi.

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Little tip: If you have an Apple Magic keyboard you can use it as a USB keyboard if you plug it in.

The basic outline of what to do:

Setup vSwitch and port groups for VLANs
Setup CHR
Add NATing
Configure DHCP
Configure VLANs
Security
Deploy VMs

Setup vSwitch and port groups for VLANs

First we need to add a vSwitch for the VLANs, now if we had a physical router we would have a second NIC to act as the VLAN Trunk into our vSwitch however as will be running a virtual router we’ll create the isolated vSwitch with the VLAN port groups each attached to an interface on the CHR.

Create the vSwitch

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