Saturday, December 19, 2009

Winter Cleaning "Rebuilding my HackLab"

Its that time of year again as a Tech when you have to take a look around and figure out which junk you are going to keep and which ones you are going to throw away. I have been meaning to rebuild my home network and make it half "HackLab" and half productions.

In doing so I started to ask myself if I wanted to keep VMWare or move on to Citrix XenServer, I will do a full blog post later with the details of that decision. I will also include some information on my setup once its complete, for now here is some pics of my old "hacklab"

My Command Center

1 HP DL 380 G4, 1 SupperMicro,2 HP DL 360 G3 servers


7 Cisco 2600 Routers, 1 Catalyst 2900 and 1 Catalyst 3500 switch

Laptops and PC spare parts

Once I have my lab in order I need to figure out which items to put on Ebay :)
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6 comments:

  1. AnonymousDecember 19, 2009 at 9:56 AM

    Please post your why you decided to goto xen from vmware, people need to hear the +'s to alternatives

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  2. Sherwyn aka (Infolookup)December 19, 2009 at 10:52 AM

    Yep I will send that along something over the following week.I am still reading through some white papers to make sure I don't just give my options but factual pros and cons.

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  3. Chad DDecember 19, 2009 at 10:41 PM

    What version of VMWare are you currently using? I've been interested in building a new server based on VMWare ESXi.

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  4. Sherwyn aka (Infolookup)December 20, 2009 at 12:09 AM

    @Chad I have been using both Esx 3.5 Enterprise and ESXi 3.5 at home and work. Don't get me wrong VMware is great but if you don't have the hardware to support vsphere 4.0 "64bit", you might want to go with ZenServer.

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  5. Chad DDecember 20, 2009 at 2:51 PM

    If I were to build something, I would make sure it's completely ESXi compatible. Hak5 had a very interesting episode on it a while back. And a corresponding forum post lists a lot of, hopefully, compatible builds. http://hak5.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=13487

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  6. Sherwyn aka (Infolookup)December 20, 2009 at 3:58 PM

    @Chad I remember that episode,they were focusing on building rather than using current hardware. The servers that I have listed above does not supports ESX 4 (Vsphere), so I started looking at other options.

    Since ZenServer has is in competition with VMWare I figured I would start doing some research on migrated my current ESX 3.5 lab over to Citrix ZenServer instead of having to spend money just to upgrade my hardware to support ESXI 4.

    If you are planning on building your server from the ground up then maybe VMWare might be the way for you, since I still get to use VMWare 3.5, and soon Vsphere at work I figured its good to try something else.

    Who knows I might like it.

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