Here is an overview of the hardware I use for my home lab.

Server

Dell PowerEdge T110 II

DellT110II

Specifications

  • PowerEdge T110 II Tower Chassis, Up to 4x 3.5″ Cabled HDDs
  • Intel Xeon E3-1220 Processor (3.1GHz, 4C/4T, 8M Cache, 80W, Turbo)
  • 32 GB LV UDIMM 1333MHz
  • 250GB SATA 7.2k
  • Broadcom NetXtreme II 5722 Single Port Gigabit Ethernet
  • Broadcom NetXtreme II 5709 Dual Port 1GbE NIC with TOE
  • Broadcom NetXtreme II 5709 Dual Port 1GbE NIC with TOE and iSCSI Offload

Storage

Iomega StorCenter px4-300d

Iomega StorCenter px4-300d

Specifications

  • Desktop form factor
  • Intel Atom Dual Core CPU at 1.8GHz with 2GB RAM
  • 4 x 3.5″ Hot swap 2TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 HDS723020BLA642
  • RAID Levels: RAID 0, 1, 10, 5, and 5+1
  • 2 x RJ45 10/100/1000Mbps (GbE) Ethernet ports. LAN standards: IEEE 802.3, IEEE 802.3u
  • 1 x USB 3.0 and 2 x USB 2.0 ports
  • iSCSI LUNs – up to 256 LUNs
  • Acoustic noise – 31 dBA maximum

Network

Cisco SG 300-10

CiscoSG300-10

Specifications

  • 128 MB RAM
  • 16 MB Flash
  • Desktop, rack-mountable (1U)
  • Fanless
  • 8 x 10/100/1000 + 2 x combo Gigabit SFP
  • Switching capacity: 20 Gbps
  • Forwarding performance (64-byte packet size): 14.88 Mpps
  • 4K Active VLANs
  • Static IPv4 routing
  • Jumbo Frame Support 10KB
  • Layer 3 switching
  • Layer 2 switching
  • DHCP support
  • BOOTP support
  • VLAN support
  • IGMP snooping
  • Syslog support
  • DoS attack prevention
  • Port mirroring
  • DiffServ support
  • Weighted Round Robin (WRR) queuing
  • Broadcast Storm Control
  • IPv6 support
  • Multicast Storm Control
  • Unicast Storm Control
  • Firmware upgradable
  • Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) support
  • Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol (RSTP) support
  • Multiple Spanning Tree Protocol (MSTP) support
  • Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) support
  • Access Control List (ACL) support
  • Quality of Service (QoS)
  • External Power Adapter

3 Comments

  1. Hi Marek,

    May I know if there is any updated hardware for the Lab ?
    I’d like to know if your lab hardware above is sufficient to run SRM or NSX.

    Thanks.

    • Hi,

      I didn’t do any upgrades on my lab. Everything is running on the hardware above.

      Regarding SRM, absolutely. I run 2 sites with each site a DC, vCenter, 2 nested ESXi hosts and SRM server.

      Not sure about NSX, didn’t test it yet but should be ok to run a basic installation. NSX Manager can be a bit more challenging as it requires 12 GB or RAM minimum.

      Cheers!

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