Homelab

Objective

To have a single server with enough power to run nested vSphere 8 and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid with NSX. But with vSphere 8 I wanted to make sure I had something on the HCL. Dell PowerEdge R740 will carry the homelab moving forward.

Hardware

• Dell PowerEdge R740
  • 2 x Intel Xeon Gold 6132 2.6Ghz 14-Core
  • 256GB RAM - 8 x 32GB 2400T DDR4 ECC
  • H730p 2gb Cache Raid Controller PCIe
  • 2x 1TB SSD in Raid 1 (Samsung 850)
  • Broadcom 2x 10Gbe SFP / 2x 1Gbe Network Daughter Card (165T0)
  • iDrac 9 Enterprise
  • 2x 750w Platinum Power Supplies
  • SABRENT NVMe M.2 SSD to PCIe Riser https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B084GDY2PW/
  • WD_BLACK 2TB SN770 NVMe https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09QV5KJHV
• Dell PowerEdge R720
  • 2 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2640 6-Core
  • 128GB RAM - 16 x 8GB ECC PC3-12800 1333Mhz
  • Replaced PERC 310 RAID Controller with LSI SAS 2008 flashed to IT mode.
  • Replaced DVD with Samsung SSD 860 EVO 500GB, used as boot drive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx9-BK0WsxU

Software

VMware vSphere 8 Licenses provided by VMUG Advantage membership

Configuration of R720

1. Install ESXi 8 to 500GB SSD on R720.
   • YES I received the warning regarding unsupported CPU. This has yet to keep me from using vSphere 8 on this server. I did have to get creative with storage since my LSI2008 or PERC 310 aren’t supported.
   • After installation I had 337.5GB for Datastore1 which I renamed to local_ssd500GB and have so far managed to squeeze 9 VMs onto it thanks to thin provisioning.
2. Install pi-hole on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS VM
   • Configure pi-hole with recursive DNS and add DNS entries for vCenter vm.
3. Install vCenter
4. Enable PCIPassthrough for SAS2008 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-2 [Falcon]
5. Install TrueNAS Core as a VM
   • Add SAS2008 HBA to VM as additional PCI device
   • Add drives to be used as iSCSI target
6. Install vSphere 8 as VM
7. Provision 4 new Ubuntu Server 22.04 VMs for Kubernetes
   • Manual
   • Via Ansible - https://github.com/fullaware/k8s-iac#installing-kubernetes-2-installk8s

Configuration of R740 coming soon