Objective
To have a single server with enough power to run nested vSphere 8 and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid with NSX. But with vSphere 8 I wanted to make sure I had something on the HCL. Dell PowerEdge R740 will carry the homelab moving forward.
Hardware
- Dell PowerEdge R740
- 2 x Intel Xeon Gold 6132 2.6Ghz 14-Core
- 256GB RAM - 8 x 32GB 2400T DDR4 ECC
- H730p 2gb Cache Raid Controller PCIe
- 2x 1TB SSD in Raid 1 (Samsung 850)
- Broadcom 2x 10Gbe SFP / 2x 1Gbe Network Daughter Card (165T0)
- iDrac 9 Enterprise
- 2x 750w Platinum Power Supplies
- SABRENT NVMe M.2 SSD to PCIe Riser https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B084GDY2PW/
- WD_BLACK 2TB SN770 NVMe https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09QV5KJHV
- Dell PowerEdge R720
- 2 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2640 6-Core
- 128GB RAM - 16 x 8GB ECC PC3-12800 1333Mhz
- Replaced PERC 310 RAID Controller with LSI SAS 2008 flashed to IT mode.
- Replaced DVD with Samsung SSD 860 EVO 500GB, used as boot drive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx9-BK0WsxU
Software
VMware vSphere 8 Licenses provided by VMUG Advantage membership
Configuration of R720
- Install ESXi 8 to 500GB SSD on R720.
- YES I received the warning regarding unsupported CPU. This has yet to keep me from using vSphere 8 on this server. I did have to get creative with storage since my LSI2008 or PERC 310 aren’t supported.
- After installation I had 337.5GB for
Datastore1which I renamed tolocal_ssd500GBand have so far managed to squeeze 9 VMs onto it thanks to thin provisioning.
- Install pi-hole on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS VM
- Configure pi-hole with recursive DNS and add DNS entries for vCenter vm.
- Install vCenter
- Enable PCIPassthrough for SAS2008 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-2 [Falcon]
- Install TrueNAS Core as a VM
- Add SAS2008 HBA to VM as additional PCI device
- Add drives to be used as iSCSI target
- Install vSphere 8 as VM
- Provision 4 new Ubuntu Server 22.04 VMs for Kubernetes