Some of you may have seen on Twitter that I was the lucky, insanely lucky, winner of the VMworld 2015 PernixData Force Awakens Homelab. Winning it was so shocking, I stared at the Tweetdeck ‘notification’ column for a good 5 minutes in disbelief but low and behold, it was true!
I’ve always been a huge proponent of homelabs for building, breaking, and in turn, learning. Prior to winning this, I had 2 HP Proliant tower servers running over iSCSI to my Synology NAS. I loved that lab… it was with me for my VCP-Cloud, VCP-5, and VCP-5.5 certifications and even learning Xen Server and Hyper-V. But, BRING ON THE SPEED!
The PernixData lab is loaded with 3 SuperMicro 5018D-FN4T’s each with:
Needless to say, these hosts SCREAM. EMC ScaleIO is serving up the capacity layer via the spinning disks while PernixData FVP is giving the performance over Intel SSD’s.
As you can see, they also supplied some nice switches to get all this connected:
Beyond the speed of this setup, it’s also surprisingly quiet. I used a decibel meter app on my Nexus 6P to gauge the sound and as you can see, it’s remarkably quiet. That is 3 servers, 2 switches, and 2 NAS’s all running.
I cannot even begin to thank PernixData, Intel, EMC, and Micron for putting this all together.