Sooner or later everyone has to and now I started into the whole VCF9 era building a brand new homelab. Honestly, I think a homelab is important to develop needed skills, help others, and test new ideas and configurations. For me personally my main goals are to demo more advanced NSX configurations, share VCFA content, and dig deeper into all the new APIs VCF9 offers. Many of you know that one of my main interests is Orchestrator. That's also a reason to build a new homelab because VCF9 offers VFCOO (VCF Operations Orchestrator) which has many new very interesting capabilities. This is just a teaser, more to come on that topic later.
Relax, this won't be another "how to build a homelab" article, this is just the start me sharing what I am using. Furthermore, it's not meant to start a discussion "what's better".
For my homelab I decided to follow the same path most of you do, I use the Minisforum MS-A2 with the AMD Ryzen™ 9 9955HX processors and 128GB RAM. I added three NVMEs with 250GB, 1TB, and 4TB.
As I already have a fully build network based on Ubiquiti components for me there is no need to change the vendor or introduce any other components.
This is a simple overview. As I have enough empty ports on my firewall I decided to patch two additional 1G links to the main switch which are used only for the lab VLANs. The reason is, if I need routing for some reason, there should be at least some bandwidth available. Even though, because of only 1G links, I'll try to avoid to route bandwidth intensive traffic.
For the main lab networking I bought a dedicated Ubiquiti Pro 8 XG switch. It offers 8x10G ethernet ports and 2x10G SFP+ ports. Each MS-A2 is connected to the lab switch with 2x10G for main lab network traffic and 1x2.5G to my enterprise switch for management traffic only. I have enough empty ports and for some reason I currently like the idea having a dedicated management connection. The QNAP NAS I have is connected with 2x2.5G, also to the enterprise switch. I don't have any plans upfront to use the QNAP for my lab as storage but it's handy to have some large capacity storage available if needed.
For the 10G SFP ports in the MS-A2 I decided to go with the SFP+ to RJ45 adapters from Ubiquiti and I hope they work. Others are using different brands and already shared that they are working.
Update 30.12.: Unfortunately I can confirm that the Ubiquiti SFP+ modules are not compatible with the Intel X710 chipset. Ordered new ones. Will share compatibility once they arrive.
No worries, won't do any unboxing stuff or hardware pictures. I prefer to share what I did wrong and could have done better. As I am in IT for more than 25 years, I decided to just start. Again I proofed myself that this approach is not the best. First I unscrewed the MS-A2 instead of using the notch to slide in the internals out. Adding the NVMEs was simple, but I had no clue where to add the memory modules. Then I remembered that I should RTFM and started searching the internet. Within seconds I stumbled across a youtube video revealing the secrets.
This is the video I watched and found very helpful: useful MS-A2 unboxing video by Andrew Hancock
Alright, hardware successfully assembled, now it's time to take the next step.
As I am working as an architect for many years, I started documenting a small design which means to specify the needed VLAN IDs and IP subnets needed for a successful VCF9 deployment. Also the host names and assigned an IP address to each host name. The second step during the preparation is to create all needed DNS entries. Always keep in mind, create A and PTR records for each host/system. I've seen so many installations and configurations failing because of misconfigured DNS. Yes, afterwards I took the time to validate every single entry from my workstation, FORWARD AND REVERSE, via command line. Guys, I takes five minutes but saves hours of troubleshooting later. I highly recommend spending those extra few minutes on the validation. Lastly I made sure that the NTP server configuration in my firewall is valid and working. After DNS, NTP is the second big source of not working configurations, at least in my experience.
The last step of day 1 was the installation of ESX on the Minis. I followed the blog shared by William Lam in terms of configuring the BIOS. I found it very helpful: BIOS configuration by William Lam.
As William provides the opportunity to do installation via a script, I decided to do everything manually just for the experience via USB. As I am using a Mac as main computer I found instructions how to create a bootable USB stick from the ESX ISO image: Create a bootable USB stick. Even if the article describes it for ESXi 8, it works perfectly for ESX 9 too.
The installer loads and the installation was as easy as always. At this point I am not sharing configuring needed management IP addresses and network configurations for the ESX hosts.
Installing all three MS-A2 concluded day 1 and there were no glitches. Next step will be deployment of the VCF installer appliance.