The topic of my last episode was: HomeLab Stage LXX: Power Consumption, now it´s time to talk about my new massive hardware refresh:
I am using servers from different hardware vendors within my environment: Apple, Dell, Fujitsu, IBM, Lenovo and SuperMicro. It is OK from a usage perspective, but it is not optimal from a monitoring and management point of view. Time to change it! What is the best hardware vendor in combination with VMware? Of course Dell! Why? Because they have developed the best integration of their services and solutions into the VMware ecosystem. Plugins for vCenter, Aria Operations, Aria Operations for Logs, Aria Automation, Fault Resilient Memory and so on. I love especially OME with the OMEVV plugin. It simplifies the admin work so much and brings a lot of fun….
My decision was clear: Replace as many servers (non-Dell) as possible in my setup. I had the chance to get 15 x Dell R740 (two of them are R740xd) machines from a customer!
Next step? A lot of hardware changes to the existing configuration…. Replacing CPUs, changing memory, swapping HDDs to SSDs, adding GPUs etc
I also recreated my HomeLab Actual State website with some cool detail infos, when you slide over the rack picture or click on it. Write me your feedback on that new feature. Do you like it?
Each new Dell R740 server is now equipped with Dual Intel Xeon Gold and minimum 384GB DDR4 memory. Some of those server have a lot more…..
Here is the list of use cases for the new machines:
- R740 VCF HoloDeck Single Host (Dual Xeon 6258R, 1,5TB RAM, 10GbE, 11 x SSD, Nvidia GPU)
- R740 vSAN ESA Max Dual Host (Dual Xeon 6130, 768GB RAM, 4 x Optane NVMe, 100GbE)
- R740xd BCDR Single Host (Dual Xeon 8167M, 768GB RAM, 7 x SSDs, 4 x 18TB HDDs, 25GbE) More details on that beast later…
- R740xd Main Cluster Dual Host (Dual Xeon 8168, 1,5TB RAM, 11 x SSD including Optanes, Nvidia RTX8000 GPU, 100GbE)
- R740 Intel GPU Dual Host (Dual Xeon 6130, 384GB RAM, 2 x SSD, Intel 140 GPU, 25GbE) More details later….
- R740 Nvidia Test Dual Host (Dual Xeon 6130, 384GB RAM, 3 x SSD, Nvidia P4 GPU, 40GbE)
- R740 vSAN ESA Cluster Dual Host (Dual Xeon 6130, 384GB, 2 x NVMe, 10GbE)
- R740 Spare Hosts Five Hosts for future projects đŸ™‚
Datacenter Rackviews:
My HomeLab is based on three datacenters with the following resources: (April 2024)
700 CPU Cores
110 GHz CPU Frequency
15,1 TB RAM
192 TB Flash Capacity
117 TB HDD Capacity
35 physical Servers
17 GPUs (vGPU & AI)
3 Storage Arrays
12 Network Switches
6 Wifi Access Points
Check the HomeLab Actual State website for infos about the racks….
Stay tuned for the next episodes with details on the new machines and their use cases……
Looking for the next episode? HomeLab Stage LXXII: Cloud Foundation
#HomeLabKing