Lab Overhaul

Its been some time since I last posted here, however in the time that has passed, I have finished overhauling my lab.  I have now setup a vsphere 5.5 cluster utilizing two diskless dell c1100 servers, each with 72GB of RAM and dual quad core xenon processors.  The servers boot esxi via flash drives.  The servers I have tied to a SAN via iSCSI with a total of 3.6TB of usable storage (split into smaller sized LUNs for use as data stores) in a RAID 10 configuration, giving me plenty of storage room for a lab with decent performance.  I also finally bought a proper rack to install all of my equipment into!

I wanted to experiment more with network virtualization, so I obtained the Cisco Nexus 1000k essentials virtual switches (these are free, you just need a valid CCO login) and replaced the standard v switches.  The servers data NICs are setup via trunks to my 3550 L3 switches and from there route through the rest of my lab network.  The servers have dedicated gig uplinks to the SAN.

All of my routing practice will be done now in a GNS3 VM that I have built-the physical routers I have are just too outdated now to really be of much use.  I'm probably going to sell all of my routers and buy myself a nice gigabit Cisco L3 switch-anyone want to donate a Nexus? :)

Future Posts

At this point, I've mostly been studying for classes as a part of my bachelor's degree program (and I already have all of the Cisco courses completed), so I haven't put much emphasis at this point in knocking out another Cisco cert.  But I still want to keep posting my work and labs here, so I will continue to do so, it may just not necessarily be Cisco related.

Lately I've been very interested in security as it applies to virtual infrastructure, so the content of my future posts will likely be orientated in that area-trying out different deployments for securing and monitoring virtual environments, such as Cisco's virtual secure gateway, vmware's vshield, etc.