Overview of the Lab

Posted by Brad on Mon 16 October 2017

Here is the current state of my lab as of October 2017. I still have a lot of plans for it, but this should provide a decent glimpse. I now have things in a bit of an odd configuration where critical VMs are running on my desktop and non-critical ones are running on the actual lab servers. This was due to moving and the recent contemplation of changing hypervisors from ovirt to vmware. I really like ovirt and its been solid, but there's just not much professional demand for it.

Physical Lab

Physical Diagram

Physically the lab is split into the office and a rack in the basement. This is mostly to keep the noisy and hot servers in the basement.

The Desktop

  • AMD Ryzen 5 1600 (12 threads)
  • 32 GB RAM (will bump to 64 if price ever drops back down)
  • 120 GB SSD for OS, 500 GB SSD for VMs, 750 GB HDD for slow archive
  • Fedora 26 KDE

Originally, I wanted to keep all the lab stuff off the desktop, then to save power I brought everything into the desktop. No matter how you slice it there are pros and cons to either set up, so you might as well pick one and run with it.

Virt Nodes

  • 1x Xeon E5645
  • 48 GB RAM
  • USB storage only

I've got a Dell R610 and HP DL380 G7 for the virtualization nodes. Each have 48 GB RAM and a Xeon E5645. Both servers are fine, but HP servers take forever to post and have some weird brackets that make them not fun to work on.

Storage Node

  • Phenom II 740
  • 12 GB RAM
  • 2x 1TB, 1x 3 TB, 2x 1.5 TB, 1x 2 TB, 1x 3 TB, BTRFS

I've also got a whitebox NAS/SAN whatever you want to call it that is currently just doing NFS for media and a static apache server hosting centos install media. In the past it ran ZFS, but that was annoying to deal with on linux, so now its doing BTRFS in "RAID 1". Its no longer doing any VM storage but that might change again in the future.

Networking

  • Cisco 3560G-48
  • Cisco SG300-20
  • Cisco ASA5520
  • Virtual OPNSense firewall

The SG300 switch is solid, but annoying in that its only about 90% IOS so it has some syntax quirks. the 3560G is getting a bit old but gives me enough capacity to not care. At some point I hope to move the OPNSense firewall to a physical appliance and have it as the primary router for both home and lab, but for now ther is some double nat awesomeness going on.

The Virtual Stuff

Virtual Diagram

The diagram says enough for an overview. Basically have Foreman for provisioning, wiki server for documentation, ldap/nfs for user stuff and borg for backups. At some point I'll write detailed posts around those. So there you have it, the current state of my lab hardware and a small snapshot of the software side as well.