The only thing constant is change. Change is the backbone of any IT organization. New widgets, software, and hardware seem to come out daily. Our job as IT professionals is to try and stay aware of these new products. However, while we try and stay ‘cutting-edge’ and ahead of all this change, we always seem to fall behind at some point. What we ought to try and do though, is not fall so far behind that we lose sight of the pack. Thus, we become obsolete and are expendable.
Recently, I went to a vCloud Director 9.x Design Workshop. Yes, my friends — vCloud Director is not DEAD. While the software is primarily for Service Providers, it is still a mighty tool that allows many IT groups the ability to rapidly deploy internal, isolated, “pods”. This training got me to thinking, ‘why am I not using vCD in my lab?’
That’s why, once again, I am updating my homelab. Over the last few years, I’ve torn down and rebuilt my lab numerous times. This has wound up taking weeks and months of time to reset back up — just to test something. It seems most often, the rebuild wastes so much time. This time around, I’m going to explore rebuilding my lab around vCloud Director 9.x.
Home Lab
Over the years, I have gone from a full 42U rack with Dell PowerEdge servers that consume massive amount of power, cooling, and my personal manpower to maintain. This hurt my wallet (as well as my time) — a lot, which also caused numerous problems with finance (aka: the wife). A while ago, I replaced the Dell PowerEdge servers with a Supermicro Super Server. This has been working out great for me. As a matter of fact, this past year I have made a few hardware modifications to the lab. I wound up running out of space and had to upgrade the hard drives in my synology box from (5) 2TB drives to (5) 3TB Drives. To expand the capabilities, additional hardware was acquired: A new Intel NUC was added as a payload target, and another Supermicro Super Server was obtained at the end of the year (Merry Christmas, right?).
Further blog posts will detail my rebuild journey. I fully intend on sharing what I learn.
