my Private cloud lab build

[clearwaterms]

I am starting this post to document and solicit advice help from the friendly people on this forum as I start to build out my Hyper-V / System Center 2012 private cloud build.

background: I am an experienced IT consultant working for a large MS centric organization. I already have extensive experience in Exchange & Active Directory.

Goal: The end goal is to build a lab that will most closely represent a multiple tenant private cloud environment. The education portions of this training is to learn the materials covered in Microsoft's 74-409, 70-246, & 70-247 exams.

I will try to break this post into 3 groups. The groups will be as follows; hardware, infrastructure (networking), and software.

 

[clearwaterms]

Hardware

Requirements:
1. 2 virtual hosts capable of running Windows 2012. Intel processors that have VT-x technology
2. 3rd machine / storage appliance
3. Enough memory on virtual hosts to run 12-15 hosts, and allow some of the hosts to automatically fail-over.
4. Storage should have enough IOPS to ensure that it is not a barrier to run 12-15 hosts simultaneously.
5. Total spend (not including hardware already owned) could not exceed $1200.

Final solution (hardware is still arriving)
1.Hyper-V Host #1
HP Z400 workstation 6-dimm model
Intel Xeon W3520 quad core /w Hyper-threading enabled.
12GB of memory (to start)
5 gigabit NIC ports (1 on board, 2*2 port cards)

2. Hyper-V host #2
HP Z400 workstation 6-dimm model
Intel Xeon W3520 quad core /w Hyper-threading enabled.
16GB of memory
5 gigabit NIC ports (1 on board, 2*2 port cards)

I purchased the machines 2nd hand and each machine included 3*2GB memory. The memory that the machines use is ECC Unbuffered which currently sells for around $55 per 4GB stick. Given my super strict budget, I opted to consolidate the 2GB sticks into one of the boxes and order 4*4GB sticks for the other.

old gaming rig
Intel Core2Duo on an Asus P5k-e processor
4GB of memory (this machine supports a total of 8GB)
5 gigabit NIC ports.

Storage
-320GB (cheapest I could find) Sata boot drive
-2TB WD drive that will be used for backups
-4* Samsung 120GB SSD that will be striped and plugged into the default controller (this will be the shared storage pool)

Possible future upgrades
Currently I am not running any 3rd party controller. Having spent a lot of time in the storage section of this site, I might add a IBM M1015 and additional spinning storage
Upgrade to 8GB of memory.


Hardware purchased: $1,000.57
2 HP Z400 workstations $458.77
16GB memory $149.99
3 HP NIC cards $51.70
3 Samsung (Amazon) $340.11

I already had the other NIC cards, machine that is being repurposed for the storage server and the 4th Samsung SSD drive.

 

[clearwaterms]

Infrastructure - Networking.

I already owned a 24 port Cisco 2970 gigabit switch. It isn't ideal for a home lab because of how loud it is, but I wanted something that was gigabit and had enough port density that would ensure that I could accurately replicate a data center environment. For routing I will be using Vyatta's community router.

I am still planning out the virtual networks, but am currently considering configuring each machine with the following configuration.

I will be building 3 logical switches

management logical switch - plugged into a single NIC used for Hyper-V host and storage server management, routed to Active Directory
guest logical switch - 2 ports connected, will have multiple VLANs connected to it, including all of the guest servers, the heartbeat / cluster traffic, The Private cloud management (SQL, Systems center, AD) that will support the environment will be a dedicated environment.
storage logical switch - Because this is a microsoft centric solution, I am going to start with SMB 3.0, but I will have the capability to do iSCSI as well. This will get the other 2 dedicated NIC ports.

All of the VLANs will be connected to the vyatta router. This will allow me to connect my lab to the home network without having to interfere with the home network and ensure that the home network devices can connect to the internet and not have to rely on anything in my lab.

 

[clearwaterms]

[this post reserved for software]

 

[Grentz]

The biggest challenge with that hardware config is memory constraints. Unless you run all the VMs with bare minimum 512mb (which will be slow on most of them), you are going to hit your memory cap quickly.

I would also recommend not striping the SSDs, the capacity will be exhausted before your hit performance issues on individual SSDs.


For reference, I run a lab with dual Hyper-V hosts, 16gb memory each, 3-5 VMs on each, Intel i3 Procs, and a combination of SSD (256gb OS) and Spinning Disk (12TB RAID storage). The memory is the main bottleneck.

The VM system center is on will be a big resource consumer as well, it is a bit of a pig.

 

[clearwaterms]

The biggest challenge with that hardware config is memory constraints. Unless you run all the VMs with bare minimum 512mb (which will be slow on most of them), you are going to hit your memory cap quickly.

I would also recommend not striping the SSDs, the capacity will be exhausted before your hit performance issues on individual SSDs.


For reference, I run a lab with dual Hyper-V hosts, 16gb memory each, 3-5 VMs on each, Intel i3 Procs, and a combination of SSD (256gb OS) and Spinning Disk (12TB RAID storage). The memory is the main bottleneck.

The VM system center is on will be a big resource consumer as well, it is a bit of a pig.

All of the system center stuff supports dynamic memory, so hopefully given that I have almost no users I will be able to run 5-6 machines per. I guess we will see.

As for the drive configuration, what do you recommend? I have 4*120GB drives. I can't run shared dynamic disks in a cluster.

I was planning on using a simple storage space (IE let windows figure it out) Storage spaces in a parity configuration is a known performance killer. Because this is a lab, I am not worried about redundancy and am afraid that in a mirror 2*120GB disks won't be large enough to run everything.