Over the last few months I have worked a lot on my home lab and completely overhauled its configuration. Working from home because of COVID-19 has “given” me a lot of time, the time I usually spend commuting, which I have been able to spend with my family and, in good part, on my own training.
Compared to my previous post (home lab), the Intel H2000 cluster has now moved from NUTANIX CE to VMware ESXi + vSAN (because of incompatibility issues between NUTANIX CE and the HP 10Gbps NICs I installed in the 4 Intel hosts).
So I started looking for a platform I could install NUTANIX on again, but with a better guarantee of hardware compatibility. A few days ago I found something on eBay that immediately had me “drooling”: a 3-node NUTANIX NX-1050 block. I couldn’t resist and bought it at a real bargain price: just over £400 (shipping included).
The CPUs are the same six-core E5-2620s I have in the ESXi hosts: a model that performs well enough for a lab, with fairly low power consumption.
Thanks to this purchase I now have NUTANIX-branded machines, which are therefore compatible with their official software. In theory, if I’m not mistaken, I should be able to install the official version of AOS and get access to the Starter license features (since these are NX machines); I’ll let you know as soon as I’ve installed it.
They are certainly not latest-generation machines but, as I said above, for a lab I’m not looking for extreme performance (and it wouldn’t make sense to buy new hardware, not to mention I couldn’t afford it).
Each node is completed with 64GB of RAM, 1 x 500GB SSD and 2 x 1TB HDDs (all 2.5″). I’ll be adding these components myself, since they weren’t part of the purchase I just made, but I already have them all on hand.
Also, and this is no small advantage, each node already has 2 onboard 10Gbps ports, integrated into the motherboard, which I’ll connect to the HP JG296A switch.
I can’t wait to have fun configuring this new environment!!
So, very soon my home lab will be made up of:
1 x Intel H2000 (4 nodes):
- 2 x Intel E5-2620 6-core CPUs;
- 64 GB of RAM;
- 1 x 16GB USB stick for ESXi;
- 1 x Intel 240 GB SSD DC;
- 1 x HDD 2TB 3.5″;
This cluster is based on VMware ESXi 6.7 CU3 and vSAN (unfortunately not compatible with ESXi 7.0).
1 x NUTANIX 1050 (3 nodes):
- 2 x Intel E5-2620 6-core CPUs;
- 64 GB of RAM;
- 1 x Samsung 500 GB SSD;
- 2 x HDD 1TB 2.5″;
This one, on the other hand, runs AHV.
All the nodes are connected to a 10Gbps HP JG296A 5920AF-24XG switch, plus a second 48-port 1Gbps HP switch for the RJ45 ports.
Thanks to the new arrival I’ll have both the VMware and the NUTANIX hyperconverged solutions available, so I can see them both in action and compare them. Both environments are mainly there to provide resources for my Citrix labs.
Update, July 23, 2020:
The new purchase has arrived! Here it is together with the rest of my home lab:
From top to bottom:
- Citrix NetScaler MPX 10500
- HP JG296A 5920AF-24XG 10Gbps
- HPE OfficeConnect Switch 1820 48G J9981A
- Sophos XG115w firewall
- Citrix NetScaler MPX 5500
- Intel H2000
- NUTANIX NX-1050
- HP DL380 Gen8