The time has finally come. After about 5 years, my Homelab was unfortunately defective. But without Homelab it’s not really nice either. For a year now, I’ve been using the HOL and recreating topics for customers there. Sure it is a great place for a guided training or to experiment in a preconfigured environment where you can’t break anything. But sometimes it would also be nice to have something consitent. And therefore, now I have finally decided to replace the mainboards of the two defective servers. After the two boards arrived yesterday, they could be replaced directly today and were given a fresh vSphere 8 u3 installation.

What did I use?

Since only the mainboard was defective, I needed a new one that was compatible with the RAM. I didn’t want to just throw away 265GB. After the ASRock D1520d4I I decided on two Gigabyte MJ11-EC1 with AMD EPYC 3151. Both boards were available cheaply online for 60€ each. So an investment that pays off. With 128 GB RAM (4x 32GB) each, there would still be room for the max config (512GB), but all my slots are full and so it will stay that way for now. Unfortunately, I overlooked the fact that the boards do not support PCI cards, which is why the 10G cards that were previously used for vmotion and vsan can no longer be used. If necessary, I will then fall back on usb network cards.

Overview

2 Hosts with
– AMD EPYC 3151
– 4x 32GB DDR4 ECC 2133
– 32GB OS SSD
– 3TB SSD
– 500GB NVME (planned for memory tiering)

Further plan

First off all a vCenter is set up and maybe the Aria components. Hopefully, in the end a holodeck is to be placed on it. In William Lam’s post about Tips & Tricks for VCF Holdeck there was a suitable link to the Multihost Holodeck VCF post by James Kilby. If memory tearing also works here, then it could even be something. But more on that in a later post or update here.