Building a Virtual Lab

The IT world is getting more and more complex. Over the last 20 years, I’ve had numerous lab configurations at home to experiment with new technologies as they emerged.

The latest trend, virtualization, helps technical people greatly in allowing them to run multiple environments on the same physical box, saving space, energy and money. Enterprises enjoy the same benefits on a much larger scale, so there are definitely advantages in moving into virtual farms.

What are your needs?

For any project, this is the basic question to ask. In the case of virtualisation, you need to determine what you’re going to do with it, how many environments you want to run, what kind of environment will you run. This will help you identify how many physical servers, how much storage, memory, and processing capacity you will need.

For my lab, I determined that being able to run at least 10-15 virtual systems, combinations of Windows and Linux would be ideal.

Which vendor’s solution should I use?

The market is becoming more and more varied as new contenders show up. While VMware’s ESX server was the only solution available a few years ago, there are now offerings from Microsoft, Citrix, SUN and Parallels.

It’s a good idea to be familiar with what each product has to offer, but developing expertise requires more dedication to a single solution. At the time, I chose to get certified on VMware ESX 2.x

In order to allow for failover of my test lab, and to experiment with enterprise features, I needed at least 2 hosts and shared storage for the virtual machines. I also wanted to work with Microsoft’s Hyper-V platform, so I added a 3rd host (which came in handy actually).

• 3 Physical Hosts, with 8GB RAM, and local storage for the OS. The two ESX platforms received 2x500GB each, and the Hyper-V server got 250GB.

Shared storage on a budget

SANs being completely out of anybody’s price range for a home/small business environment (not counting the technical know-how on setting them up), I started searching for alternatives. I found several solutions:

• NAS appliances
• Software solutions: FreeNAS, OpenFiler, SANMelody Lite
• Virtual appliances: XtraVirt and FalconStor NSS

The NAS appliances are expensive and while supported, were not what I wanted. The Virtual Appliances allow you to use local storage, and have it replicated on the 2nd host in real time, so in case of failure, the other host has all the data. VMware’s VMotion actually works with this solution. Unfortunately, both solutions failed to work properly (XtraVirt is barely supported, and NSS is so new, the free license wasn’t even out for me to try and the sales rep couldnt confirm when it would be available (if ever)). I then tried the 3 software solutions. FreeNAS didn’t work on my hardware (NIC not recognized if I recall correctly). SANmelody Lite is a great solution, but is limited in the amount of storage space allowed, and it is not free (but fairly cheap). Then there’s OpenFiler, which works great as an iSCSI target, and is exactly what I was looking for.

Networking

Networking is another important component of the lab. Features like VMotion, deploying servers from templates, and shared storage require a solid infrastructure. I wanted to isolate the storage traffic from the network traffic. At first, I bought two small 8 port gigabit switches but one was finicky and wouldn’t negotiate with some NICs properly. A good alternative to enterprise switches was a web-managed 24 port switch that allowed VLAN configurations. A friend recommended a Linksys SRW2024, which fit the bill.

Licensing

Ok, while all of this is very nice, there is software to install, and most commercial software isn’t free. Microsoft has the Technet subscription that allows you to install pretty much all of their products without having to worry about trial periods. Also, if you’re setting up an active directory infrastructure for the lab, you don’t want to have to reinstall your domain controllers every 3 months.

All software manufacturers need to come up with products or licensing schemes for tech people to install FULL versions of their products. We support them, we need to learn them, please provide low cost solutions for us!

Shopping list

After all the planning, comes the spending part.

System #1 – Shared Storage

• System board – ASUS M2NPV-VM
• Processor – AMD Athlon X2 3800+
• Memory – 4 x 1GB
• Storage – 4 x 1TB SATA2
• Enclosure – Antec Sonata III casing and power supply
• Network – Intel gigabit adapter and on-board adapter

System #2 – Microsoft Hyper-V

• System board – Asus P5K-VM
• Processor – Intel Q6600 Quad Core 2.4Ghz
• Memory – 4 x 2GB
• Storage – 1 x 250GB
• Enclosure – Antec Sonata III casing and power supply
• Network – Intel gigabit adapter x 2 and on board adapters

System #3 and 4 – VMware ESX hosts

• System board – Intel BOXDQ35JOE
• Processor – Intel Q6600 Quad Core 2.4Ghz
• Memory – 4 x 2GB PC2-6400
• Storage – 2 x 500GB SATA2
• Enclosure – Antec NSK1380 casing and power supply
• Network – Intel EXPI9300PTBLK PCIe gigabit adapter x 2

Networking

• Linksys SRW2024 Web Managed Switch

Conclusion

I hope this information is useful to you. Feel free to ask if you have any questions!