Is was time for a homelab for the next couple years.
The old one was a HP Z800 with dual Xeon and 42GB RAM. The storage was one 1TB SAS disk on 15000 RPM and one SSD. This was enough for the last couple years as a homelab. VMware did release some new cool products and my personal homelab was not good anymore and needs a replacement. The next step was to build a fast new one with enough power for a couple years. In this first part of blog I will write down the parts and some problems what I did had with this new HomeLab.
The parts
Down in the table you will see what the parts are for my new homelab. The homelab will run a full nested environment for to test new producties.
| Name | type or link |
| SuperMicro E300-9d-8cn8tp | Supermicro E300-9d |
| Memory | 4x 64GB DDR RAM |
| Harddisk (NVMe) | 1x 500GB –> Samsung 970Evo (Cache vSAN) 3x 1000GB –> Samsung 970Evo (Capacity vSAN) 1x 2000GB –> Local Storage ESXi |
| SataDom | 64GB – SSD-DM064-SMCMVN1 |
| PCI-Raiser for SuperMicro | RSC-RR1U-E16 |
| NVME-card for 4 NVME | Amfeltec Squid Carrier Board™ Family PCI Express Gen 3 Carrier Board for 4 M.2 PCIe SSD modules |
| FAN | 40mm fan noctua |
After I get all the parts the next job was to put every thing together. The memory, FAN en 1 NVMe where placed within minutes. The biggest step was the place the Amfeltec card. I was a PCIe express card without a low profile bracket and the card is 2 cm wide. You can also say the case is 2cm small for the placement of this card, but we can solve that with some tricks.
For the this problem you have two choices:
1ste). You can choose to make a extra slit in the side of black case so that the card fits;
2de). You can put the card in the x16 slot and remove the top plate of the case.
The best choose of this card is that you can place 4 NVMe card on one PCIe express card. The NVMe can be from different vendors and from different sizes. To enable it you need a motherboard with bifurcation and need to change the BIOS for the PCI slot to 4x4x4x4x and you get all the performance for the card. This was the build for the hardware in next part we begin the base install of the new homelab.