After finishing the Operations SSL in the last stage it was time to invest again, but this time in Datacenter II:
I am very happy with my SuperMicro Boards (X10-SDV) so I decided to buy another one and put each into a 1HE SuperMicro case. I was lucky on eBay to acquire two rack cases including power supplies for a very very small price.
The Supermicro Servers are equipped with a Quad Core Xeon-D 2.20 GHz CPU and 128GB DDR4 RAM (4 x 32GB ECC). This is the maxed out version with 6 x 1GbE, 2 x 10GbE NICs, 2 x PCIe x8 slots, one NVMe M2 slot and 4 x SATA ports.
This setup is perfectly made for vSAN! One Samsung SM961 NVMe M2 device for caching and 4 x 1TB SanDisk SATA SSDs for capacity. The network configuration for the ROBO cluster is done with the 2 x 10GbE SFP+ NICs in Direct Connect Mode.
I have configured two different Link Aggregation Groups (LAG) with the vDS, one for Management and one for the VMs. The vSAN Witness traffic is handled through the 2x1GbE Mgmt LACP vDS. The vSAN Witness appliance for this cluster is running onto the ESXi hosts in Datacenter One.
I have placed Noctua Low Noise Fans inside the 1HE chassis and replaced the passive cooled CPU heatsink with an active one. The systems are still operating in low noise mode. Both systems are configured with a SuperMicro Management license to support for example BIOS via the IPMI GUI.
One SuperMicro host is also equipped with a Lenovo (LSI) ServeRaid M5210 SAS / SATA Raid Controller. The following devices are attached to it:
2 x 1TB SATA SanDisk SSDs in Raid 1 with WriteBack option configured
2 x 8TB SATA WD HDDs in Raid 1 also with WriteBack option configured
My Cohesity Virtual Edition Remote VM is using that dedicated storage for the replicated data of my Cohesity Virtual Edition Cluster running in Datacenter One. I know, that this setup will hurt my DRS behavior (because it is only available inside one host).
One SuperMicro host is running only the Cohesity VM (4 vCPUs and 32 GB RAM) but having vSAN makes ESXi host upgrades very easy. The vCenter for Datacenter Two is also running onto this SuperMicro Cluster.
I am replicating a few of my most important VMs from Datacenter I to the SuperMicro vSAN inside Datacenter II.
You can check the next episode here: HomeLab Stage XLV: New Monster Workstation