Tag: VMWare

Virtual Home Server Part 2

Back in November last year, I posted to this blog with the initial setup of my “home” server (https://www.wardnet.co.uk/virtual-home-server/) which in its former life was a Veeam backup server for an SME. This previous life means that it is a very high spec for its age and it may have a few TB of storage to boot! – Storage is an interesting point here as whilst there is around 8TB total (after RAID) it is not SSD or even high end SAS, therefore this space is at the cost of performance. The good thing here, is that performance is not critical to what I am using the servers for, there’s more than enough capacity and performance to deliver media via Plex for local and remote users and deliver reasonable DB performance for testing of installation processes – which currently relates to my day job. Below I have included an image of the VMWare ESXi Dashboard from today, not too much difference to the one I posted back in November other than the number of VMs has increased from 8 to 13 and therefore available storage has gone down by just around half a terabyte:

But that’s boring… what about the VM setup, anything exciting there?

Well let’s take a look:

Therefore, I have a lab domain setup now (wardnet.local) which I am using for testing out various ERP install/config scenarios, including down to the client layer with the last one in the list being a Windows 10 VM.

Four ERP servers I hear you scream, well, yes, rather… ERP2 is now solely an SQL server delivering the DBs for ERP3 and ERP4, with ERP1 being a self-contained SQL and App for the latest and greatest versions. APPS is actually a SharePoint 2013 Foundation server (DB is on ERP2) which is acting as document storage currently for the ERP servers.

I am also utilising my DC as a mail server with hMail and a .Net based webmail service (with mySQL backend) so I do not need a mail client anywhere! – My hMail implementation will be an extra post on here in the not too distant future I hope.

Extrasphere will be a blog post of its own TBC but it is a free cloning utility for ESXi implementations and works quite nicely.

In Summary, this server has allowed me to get my geek on with virtualisation, networking, server hardware and operating systems deployment from an infrastructure point of view, but also it has allowed me to delve back into the Sysadmin side of things, Domain creation, GPO deployments (Windows Updates, Shared Folders, BGInfo and more), mail server management, SharePoint admin etc. In addition, it has strengthened my expertise in the more recent transition into the application side of things, with many ERP deployment scenarios now tested (and scripted), as well as some real world simulations into config and usage of the ERP systems themselves. So now, I have a platform for testing anything, from Hardware tweaks through to Accounts Receivable invoicing!

Virtual Home Server

As one of those people who loves to be running the latest tech in both my home and professional lives it’s critical that I build the correct infrastructure in order to achieve that.

At home I recently obtained a 2014 spec Dell server, which had a fair bit of memory and storage, certainly for what was to become the hub of my home operations!

In the last 2 months I have been building the server up, utilising all the latest platforms I can get my hands on.. VMWare ESX 6.5, Windows 10/2016, Ubuntu 16.04 etc.

I now have 8 VMs, across 2 datastores having upgraded all firmware possible and playing around with various settings to balance performance and noise (it’s in the spare room)

Here’s the outcome of that work:

This first image shows my ESX 6.5 HTML5 based landing page (one of easiest to use web admin tools I’ve seen), you’ll note the 128GB RAM, Dual 2.9GHz CPUs and 8.5TB storage – perfect for running media servers as well as testing platforms for my crazy ideas!

Drilling down into the VMs I have built you’ll see a mixture of OSes and things I’m testing:

I was clever enough (somehow) to make my FTP server web facing, it’s where I store all the freebie utility style programs that I use across many systems, It allows me to use it instead of having to carry a USB around all the time!

Plex is the big one, over 3TB assigned to it for all the media we have at home, we can play it across all our devices, such as the SmartTV, Amazon Fire Stick, XboxOne etc.

What I’ve not yet got to grips with is the VMNetwork side of things, eventually I’d like to VLAN off some of the VMs to do some sandbox style testing with various OSes, maybe get back into Linux and re-learn hardening techniques etc, just need the time!