It seems like the period of stability has ended and the calm before the storm has arrived at the Complaints HQ Lab. Here is a sneak preview:

So what’s new in that confused and, honestly, insane home LAN landscape?  It looks innocent enough, skulking there in the corner of the VMware Lab section, yet it’s anything but.  That’s right, through the miracle of year end budget allocations, the “once a decade” opportunity to equip a home lab has finally landed on yours truly and as a result an “almost too ridiculous to have at home” Dell T620 is en route!  For my fellow hardware junkies, here are the specs:

• 192GB 1333 LRDIMM DRAM
• 2 x Xeon E5-2650L v2 10 core
• PERC H710 512MB RAID card
• 4 x 2TB 7200RPM 6Gb/s NL-SAS RAID 5
• iDRAC7 Enterprise ILO Board
• Broadcomm 5719 QP 1Gb/s PCI-E Ethernet
• Intel i350 DP 1Gb/s PCI-E Ethernet
• 750W PSU

In addition to the T620, a Buffalo TeraStation 5400 12TB NAS, another Netgear 7224 and another APC UPS are also on the way.  I’m still deciding whether to retire my existing slimline hosts and replace them with the T620 (the sane choice), or add the T620 into the mix (the insane choice).  Either way, here is what I’m considering doing and documenting:

• Addition of T620 to existing vCenter
• Nested ESXi setup on the T620 (too many cores and too much RAM for a single host instance!)
• Upgrade of entire environment to the latest bits (ESXi, vCenter, vCO, vCOPs, vCD, vCAC)
• Build out a new vCenter within nested and start testing SRM

That’s the plan so far and it will come down to how much time I can carve out.  The ship date for the gear is early December, so it looks like the holidays will be busy!  Stay tuned!