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Home Lab Build #2

Small Office Build #1

For small office builds, we want to take into consideration additional factors that go beyond the requirements of a home lab build. We want to consider building for scalability for growing customer needs, building for manageability of administration by simplifying compute, storage, and networking requirements to reduce troubleshooting time and limit areas of risk all while making an affordable system for your business. In today's market, there has been an increase in the implementation of hyperconvergence (HCI) as a solution for system deployments by merging compute, storage, and networking into one software-defined pane where administrators can manage everything from one single pane of glass. In theory, this would reduce troubleshooting as being able to define these components in software could save time and effort, however it's practicality in the field has seen mixed results according to a few businesses I have worked with. This first build outlines core components of deploying a hyperconverged system cluster using Dell’s VxRail with VMware’s vSphere Cloud Foundation. The VMware Cloud Foundation includes vSphere, vCenter, vSphere Kubernetes Service, their software-defined storage capability called 'VMware vSAN' and their software-defined networking capability called 'VMware NSX'. Dell VxRail offers a list of products tailored to the type of deployment businesses are preparing to deliver for their customers. The product line is as follows:

Small Office Build #2

Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) has its use cases for today’s growing businesses although is not for everyone and doesn’t fit into every IT business model. There are still plenty of hardware configuration options to stay within budget and not rely on HCI for administration. One of the drawbacks of HCI is what happens when things break? What happens if your datacenter experiences an unscheduled power outage and your vSAN isn’t rebalancing as expected upon booting the system and your NSX Overlay Segments are also not working as expected? Well if you are experienced with troubleshooting VMware’s vSAN and NSX you may be able to fix the problem and bring up your VMs in no time, but if you aren’t well versed in these-it could be a long time before VMs and services come back online. System Administrators and System Engineers would need diverse skillsets in all areas of HCI to be able to successfully troubleshoot issues when they arise. Managing individual components would allow you to isolate issues by fixing only the components that are affected without relying on needing deep knowledge of the HCI to fix an issue. Another potential drawback to HCI and why this second build focuses more on building out and managing individual components is there is potential for vendor lock-in that could result in high cost increases. Dell’s VxRail is tightly configured for Broadcom VMware and the new licensing model for VMware has recently drastically increased in price from the perpetual licenses that were previously offered. The following is a potential build-out for a Remote Office Branch Office (ROBO) small business. It uses 1 ESXi host (with the ability to add more) redundant SSDs by way of the on board RAID controller, a 4 port 1Gb network adapter, enterprise grade edge and core switches, and an all-flash storage array optimized for virtual machine performance.

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