Home VMWare Lab Setup

I was recently excited to add a second host (glorified desktop PC) to my home VMWare Lab which previously consisted of:

1 x ASUS P8H61-I Intel H61 Motherboard

1 x INTEL CORE i7 3770 3.40Ghz 8MB CACHE 95W LGA1155

1 x G.SKILL F3-12800CL10D-16GBX Twin Pack RIPJAWS X 2x8GB 16GB DDR3 1600MhzCL10 PC3-12800

1 x ANTEC ISK300-150 Mini-ITX Case Black 150watt Power Adapter

1 x INTEL PT DUAL PORT GIGABIT PCI EXPRESS NIC

 1 x 4GB USB 2 Flash Memory (to Boot from)

All the usual considerations came into play when scoping out a suitable host, as power, noise and physical footprint all come into play.

My first host is running ESXi 5 with Update 2.

I've been super happy with the above spec, low noise, hardware compatibility and whilst most of the environment is set up for network admin/sys admin test case scenarios and study for my career - I do have some decent real time IO for PABX/Desktop VM/IIS Webserver/SQL GIS Query server that gives me something to work with.

The ESXi host is connected through iSCSI to a Synology 1512+ via the INTEL PT Dual port gigabit NIC through a Cisco 3560 Gigabit switch I managed to get off eBay at a decent price. The onboard NIC is used for management/VM Network.

So the new host that I setup last week consists of:

1 x ASROCK H61M-ITX Socket LGA1155 MINI ITX

1 x INTEL CORE i7 3770 3.40Ghz 8MB CACHE

1 x G.SKILL F3-12800CL10D-16GBX Twin Pack RIPJAWS X 2x8GB 16GB DDR3 1600MhzCL10 PC3-12800

1 x ANTEC ISK300-150 Mini-ITX Case Black 150watt Power Adapter

 1 x 4GB USB 3 Flash Memory (to Boot from)

1 x INTEL PT DUAL PORT GIGABIT PCI EXPRESS NIC

The reason I posted this, is that I know it can be hit and miss with hardware compatibility (although VMWARE 5.x has become much more flexible) and hopefully I will help someone confirm any question about compatibility.

I am even using WOL on both hosts for DPM to control power management. It's working really well : )