I know a lot of you guys have home labs and are always looking for that next cool thing. Every once in a while you see something cool floating by on twitter and in this case it was so cool I needed to share it with you guys. Someone posted a picture of his version of “EVO:RACK” leveraging Intel NUC, a small switch and Lego… How awesome is a Lego VSAN EVO:RACK?! Difficult to see indeed in the pics below, but if you look at this picture then you will see how the top of rack switch was included.
Lego VSAN EVO Rack NUC style… Version 2.. Note top of rack switch!! @pdxvmug @vmwarevsan @IntelNUC @vExpert pic.twitter.com/SYFa6leLxX
— Nicholas Farmer (@vmnick0) January 9, 2015
Besides the awesome tweet, Nick also shared how he has build his lab in a couple of blog posts which are worth reading for sure!
- VSAN Cluster Running On Three Intel NUCs – Part 1 (The Build)
- VSAN Cluster Running On Three Intel NUCs – Part 2 (vCenter Deploy)
Enjoy,
Fun Lego rack for sure! Why no Lego cable management ducting, seems like a no brainer 🙁 But seriously RTL8168 isn’t on HCL, and I personally cant even get routing/auto-link when using 5.1 nic VIB for 5.5. 5.5 Doesn’t even support 8168/8169 (RTL8111 is evil!)… The SSD’s chosen cant deal with any kind of load and result in > 300ms latencies and more negatives. Not sure how useful one MD storage per host will be. Then there is Queue Depth, nay the non existent Queue Depth. The lack of more than two Gbe ports isn’t an issue, because I seriously doubt the vsan will be capable of > 40MB sustained r/w let alone 4k + randoms. http://www.lowjax.com
I am guessing this is not the setup you want indeed for performance testing, but functionality testing wise it should work, although with a bit of hassle indeed…
I too am running ESXi on Intel NUCs. I haven’t got as far as a VSAN yet though.!
http://myrandomthoughts.co.uk/2014/12/intel-nuc-as-a-esxi-host-part-1/