So as it turns out, having access to a vSphere lab at the office is something of a double-edged sword. Upside: I never had to pay for my own lab equipment. Downside: I also spentΒ wayyyyy too much time at the office playing around with experiments. So, I finally bit the bullet and put together my home lab. Which, as it would turn out, posed some interesting problems considering that I live in a 600 sqft apartment.
So. Small apartment, need a home lab, don’t want to have toΒ listen to the home lab (R610s, why must you be so loud?), also don’t want to spend a fortune. What to do?
Presenting…the laptop lab!
The idea for the lab came from a coworker while I was browsing eBay for cheap(ish) desktop hardware that would be vSphere-compatibleβhe remarked that he had successfully installed ESXi on an older Dell D630, so why didn’t I just try laptops? It turns out he was really onto something. Older workstation-class laptops are pretty cheap on eBay and work great with ESXi 5.5 and 6 (as long as you don’t mind being limited to one Ethernet port).
I was able to pick up two Lenovo W510 systems, each with a quad-core i7 and 20GB of RAM, for less than $800 total. Combined with the Airport Express (to serve as a network bridge), my Synology unit I had around already, and an 8-port Gigabit switch, and I haveΒ a fully functional and nearly invisible lab environment in my apartment. The only real thing I miss out on is having iLO/iDRAC which is annoying but not a huge issue. Plus, the resale value on these laptops is pretty good-βthey’ve depreciated about as much as they’re ever going to so I’m pretty likely to be able to get my money back out of them in a year or two if/when I upgrade to new gear.
So, in total: 8 pCPUs, 40GB pRAM, for under a thousand bucks all in. Not half badβif I do say so myself.