Normally my blogs are more technical and at least get the information accross about how to do different things within VMware’s toolbox. Today, I’m starting a series(ish) on doing a homelab. Yes this is new for me and i’m working through some basic things i havn’t had to do since ESXI 5.5. SO there is some learning to do. Thoughts so far

1. Distributed switches… where did they go??
2. Oh man supermicro boot delay is killing me…
3. Cable management… this is why i got into coding…
4. Networking… should the edge go to the router to the system or a different way?

These are all thoughts that went through my brain. Not very helpful i know, but maybe some of this can help those like me, who spend all their time in already built enterprise solutions, has a rack/stack team that bring the server up, then a networking team to add the needed networking.

But, thats the annoying, The good is I’ve got some great stuff to dig into and to worth through. I’m going to be slamming through this now and getting this done. First though..

The Setup

Current List of assets:

1. 3 Supermicro E200s
2. 1 Ubiquity edge switch
3. 3 Samsung nvme SSDs for storage
4. Alot of cables

So first things first, I put the SSD into M2 slot on each of the machines. There was two philips screws on the back, then an overhead plate covering the ram/SSD slot etc. Once i removed that i was able to access the screw that would hold the SSD in place.

Cabling the three with the switch wasn’t too bad, I purchased a miniature server case to put everything in from amazon. It doesn’t look too bad, I pulled a 1×6 from the garage and built a table with no topper to allow cables to come up from the bottom. Pictures incoming!!

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So cabling is completed, and everything is “racked”… lol

ESXI 6.7

YUP, Lets get to imaging.

For those that did anything with Supermicro the pain of that 1 ms default boot screen is rough. Immediately save yourself the pain and change that to 10000 once you get through the bios.

I wont go through the settings etc for imaging ESXI because its pretty well documented and not too difficult.

However, Imaging for VCSA has been a bit of a sludge for me, but again, there is alot of already written documentation. Heres a good youtube vid that will lead you the right way.

Which leads us to where we are currently… I’m trying to figure out how to setup networking and get it setup properly.