First off—hello and thank you for visiting my blog :-). Right now I’m in the process of reviewing all of my notes and code related to personal projects I’ve worked on going back roughly three or four years. My hope is to be able to convert some of that documentation into content for this blog, so stay tuned.

For now, I want to begin with my last big homelab upgrade saga, which I started sometime in late 2018 and just finished up in early 2021.

By the time I got started with my lab upgrade project, I’d already spent a couple of months researching options with respect to server hardware that I could use for putting together a new VMware vSphere cluster. I also had a few goals/requirements that I’d use to guide some of my choices throughout the project. The lab I was building should:

1. Have enough resources to carry all of my personal development app and database servers, plus redundant capacity.
2. Be within my budget.
3. Not take up a ton of (physical) space in my house.
4. Not run up my electricity bill much more than is necessary.

Up to that point, I’d tentatively committed to moving forward with “white box” builds for my cluster hosts. I’d thought this approach made the most sense for my use case for a few reasons, maybe the biggest of which was my requirement for relatively inexpensive, small form factor hosts.

I was also aiming to build an environment that would support a VMware vSAN cluster. This would mean I’d need at least three hosts to add to a vSphere cluster in order to meet the requirements of vSAN. And at that time, I’d thought that the only off-the-shelf systems that met my other technical requirements were models in a 2U rackmount or a tower form factor. I just didn’t have the space I’d need in my house for three tower servers or three 2U rackmount servers.

I came across a blog post by William Lam in which he’d described his evaluation of the Supermicro E300-9D, a compact 1U height server system. In his post, William suggested that Supermicro’s E300-9D Superserver could be a good fit for a home lab environment. After taking a closer look at the system specs for the E300-9D-4CN8TP, it looked like onboard 4x10Gbit networking and 512GB max supported memory in a “compact” server would be hard to beat. All of the sudden I wasn’t so convinced that it would be necessary to custom build small form factor servers for my new lab.

After a couple more weeks of research and shopping around, I ended up ordering a pair of E300-9D-4CN8TP’s to evaluate. And within a week of getting them set up, I was working my way through documentation from VMware describing a two-node vSAN cluster and preparing to migrate workloads from my old lab onto this pair of new servers.

In the next few posts, I’m going to go through the major components/highlights/milestones/whatever of my dev lab. I hope someone finds it informative or at least interesting. (: