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. Therefor I am considering the Unifi Cloud Gateway Fiber as replacemenet.

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 one Ultra 60W, which powers one of the access points and one of the Flex Mini’s. I am considering replacing the Omada with an equal or faster Unifi switch at a certain point.

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.

The fourth node in this cluster is an almost equal machine. It is a ‘12’ core i7 node, also running with 64GB of memory, a quad nic pci-e card, a 480GB Cache disk and a Samsung 990 PRO 1TB M2 SSD disk.

The cluster runs various Unix VM’s as well as vLCM, Aria Operations, Aria LogInsight, vIDM and when needed an NSX-T node, even with these memory blocks available, I am constrained on it, so some VM’s run only when needed.

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.

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: