In this post I want to tell you about the setup I built for my home lab environment.
At the end of last year I decided that my old lab environment, made up of two HP DL360 G8 servers, needed to be replaced with something faster and with more capacity; so I scoured eBay for a solution that would suit my needs and found an Intel server model that I liked right away: the Intel H2000
This solution is a 2U box containing 4 nodes with very respectable specs (for a lab): 2 x Xeon e5-2620, 64GB of RAM and 3 x 3.5″ bays each, for a total of 8 x Xeon e5-2620, 256GB of RAM and 12 disks; a solution very similar to the NUTANIX NX-1320 machines (https://www.concurrent-thinking.com/2019/02/23/nutanix-discovery/).
A setup like this, completed with 2 SSDs and 1 HDD per node, allowed me to build a virtual environment based on a 3-node NUTANIX CE cluster plus a fourth node running VMware 6.7 (where I migrated the VMs that lived on the old, now decommissioned, environment).
As for the network, even though the nodes I bought came with MELLANOX Connect-X3 InfiniBand ports, I decided to buy an HP 5920AF switch with 24 x 10Gbps SFP+ ports and I added 1 x HP 593717-b21 (with 2 x 10Gbps SFP+ ports) to each node. This way I was able to get 20Gbps links between the cluster nodes and therefore very respectable replication performance for the NUTANIX cluster; all over standard Ethernet.
So on this environment I have all the horsepower I need to create virtual machines galore and to indulge my constant need to test the IT solutions that interest me most.
In particular, given my role as a Citrix consultant, I often want to try out new versions of Citrix products before implementing them at customers’ sites, and here I can build all the virtual machines I need.
NUTANIX CE has proven to be a solid solution for building a very respectable hyperconverged cluster (for lab use, of course) and I’m really very happy with the result.