Stable Home ESXI architecture

[Arka]

Hello everyone,

I'm new on this forum and there is plenty of informations.

Since 6 months i'm watching around me and i'm thinking to buy my own virtualization plateform. I have several needs and i can't decide which kind of hardware i should buy.

I was thinking about XEN but to be honest i haven't enough time to invest on its configuration so i will focus on ESXI for the moment.

Currently my network is pretty small and still in 10/100 so i want to expand my possibilities and performances.

I want your advices on my future configuration/architecture, if it could fit my needs and if my choices are correct.

Here are my needs (there is a schema below).

I want a virtualization plateform which can contain everything (an all in one, since my budget is not unlimited ~ 1500&#8364.

This plateform should contain :
- a firewall (pfense vm, including a vpn to my local network)
- my dmz with some stable servers (website, lamp, collaborative dev projects, antispam, remote vms temporaries, etc..)
- Some lan vms like a NAS (i dunno yet which kind of distribution i will use for this), a mail server, my developpement vm and some testing/learning vms

Link to the network schema : Link here

I cannot disable the NAT on my ISP Router however i'm able to configure port forwarding so it isn't a problem. With a proper pfsense configuration I think I can do a second NAT (with static/dynamic IP pool and enabling private IP routing).

My main concern is the single point of failure that my ESXI could be. Even if I could secure everything (like disabling remote access to the ESXI management interface) i'm worried about having my NAS on the same host. Security of my personnal datas is my priority so I don't exclude to buy a single NAS later instead of having a VM.

I haven' defined any hardware configuration yet and this is why i'm asking your advices. I thought about :
- 256Go Samsung 840 Pro as Datastore
- Usb key as ESXI drive
- A server class motherboard (ideally with several sata controllers since if i use a NAS vm)
- E3 Xeon/32Gb ECC Memory
- An UPS and a switch

Sorry if my english is approximative, i'm trying to do my best. I'm listening to all your advice and thank you in advance.

 

[Racheakt]

I work with VMware quite alot at work (I manage a small office datacenter with multiple nodes),

I use a white box at home with a DMZ and VPN. While there is not much you can do about the single point of failure without spending some dough (the cost of the Vsphere essentials kit is ~$500, and essentials plus is almost $5000) and of course the cost of an iSCSI Capable NAS...

This Link is where I started. Since I personally was only doing this to toy around I did not do shared storage at home with multiple hosts, I just have one with a couple TB on mirrored storage.

As for my VPN, I tried using some of the open source VPN solutions out there, I had issues getting it to work right trying to get my home ISP to reliable recognize my VM firewall as the delivery point. And i ran into situation with my IP phone a double NAT I think.

I hit Ebay and found a cheap Cisco ASA 5505 ($250 with the Security+ license, has 8 assignable ports), since it has built in VPN capability and (even with the base license) to set up a DMZ relatively easy, I set it up some thin like this:


This is the way I have mine setup: