Gear

My gear

Based on the gear page of Paul Grevink (just use google), I decided to publish my lab setup as well. Since it is based on Paul’s gear you see some similarities. We both have the Synology (218+), but admittedly we both had that already before we got to know each other.

Gateway

My gateway running the KPN fiber line we have is a Mikrotik RB5009, hosting a couple of VLAN’s, IGMP Proxy for the KPN iTV and IPv6 as well. Note that I am not entirely convinced by the RB5009 yet, especially with all the weird quirks in the firmware.

Switches

My household uses a few switches, a unifi US-8 with POE out is hosting a few connections downstairs, and in my lab I currently have a TP Link Omada SG3428. As ‘intermediate’ switches I use the cheap Ubiquity Flex Mini’s to passthrough the VLAN’s and connect one of the AP’s.

Accesspoints

There are three AP’s in the house, on the bottom floor, one at the bedroom floor and one on the top floor. Driven by the Ubiquiti U7-Pro.

VMWare cluster

My VMware cluster (as virtualisation engineer you must have this), consists of three Nuc13 PRO’s (RNUC13ANHI70002), with Samsung 990 PRO 1TB SSD’s and Kingston A400 480GB SSD’s and a small 64GB M2 local disk. Each machine has 64GB of Samsung Fury memory, and an additional NIC to support a distributed switch that has multiple uplinks. This forms a VSAN cluster, which hosts several VM’s, amongst them my playground machines, home automation, and things like databases.

NAS

Since I cannot afford a SAN at home, I have a NAS that is driven by the Synology DS218+ having 2x4TB (raid1) storage available. Large VM’s land here, as well as servicing internal data and for backups.

A second Synology DS1522+ serves the proxmox node and various VMware VM’s, I actively use the 4x1GB Ethernet connections in a dual LAG setup for NFS4 access (The disks are the bottleneck). This Synology has 2x4TB Raid1 storage and 2x3TB Raid1 storage available. Important data from the DS218+ is also mirrored on this node.

Playmachine

Next to the VMware cluster, I also have a Proxmox node that has a single 2TB disk as boot and images as well as a 3x1TB software raid-5 array for local storage of the VM’s. This machine has 64GB Ram and a ‘12 core’ i7 CPU. Since recent this machine runs a few VMware VM’s like vLCM, Aria Operations, Aria Loginsight, etc. This node also has that additional Nic over USB, and the node hosts a nested ESXi for the above mentioned VMware VM’s.

Probe

Along the line at some point in time I got a RIPE Atlas probe (the hardware version) that runs since 2016 already, and only had a couple of USB sticks replaced :-).

Offline equipment

The following hardware is what is still in ‘storage’ but are offline: