Planning to expand home network

[takeawaydave]

I am planning to expand my home lab so I can run some more virtual hosts (ESXi). For space saving and generally efficiency I am planning to go with each mounts.
I plan to spend in total between 1000-1500 USD and would ideally like an additional 2 machines.
I was checking eBay and there is a ton of different stuff.
Any advice or recommendations on what I might want to check out?

 

[amalurk]

2 x Variant 1U Supermicro Server X9DRI-LN4F+ Rev 1.20 up to 2x E5-2690 V2 256GB RAM | eBay
with 2x 2620v2 and 48gb ram? like $1300 shipped Will still need drives.

Or give a better idea of what you are looking for cores/ram, need low power or not, drive bays/storage etc....

 

[takeawaydave]

2 x Variant 1U Supermicro Server X9DRI-LN4F+ Rev 1.20 up to 2x E5-2690 V2 256GB RAM | eBay
with 2x 2620v2 and 48gb ram? like $1300 shipped Will still need drives.

Or give a better idea of what you are looking for cores/ram, need low power or not, drive bays/storage etc....

Thanks Amalurk for the reply - I've been away so only just saw it today. The SM stuff looks promising... some more info:

• A low power(-ish) setup would be ideal
• Hardware to run a pair of ESX Servers to run:

4 x Large(-ish) VMs (meaning 8 vCPU / 16 GB RAM)
8 x Medium VMs (meaning 4 vCPU / 8 GB RAM)
16 X Small VMs (meaning 2 vCPU / 4 GB RAM)​

• Hardware to set up Expandable Storage Backend to run FreeNAS or vSAN
• A Switch to create VLans (3560 or something UniFy?)
• Hardware to run PfSense

 

[maze]

Is there any reason you want a switch to handle vlan routing? and not just use a firewall insted.. like pfsense or simular.

 

[takeawaydave]

Is there any reason you want a switch to handle vlan routing? and not just use a firewall insted.. like pfsense or simular.

Ah this question I think starts to touch on my lack of networking escpecially when it comes to vlan's.

Could I run pfsense on ESXi to achieve separate VLANS for running VMs ?

 

[maze]

Ah this question I think starts to touch on my lack of networking escpecially when it comes to vlan's.

Could I run pfsense on ESXi to achieve separate VLANS for running VMs ?

Yes. Pfsense, edgerouter, Cisco ASA or basically any firewall Can do that. Ofc you need to make sure it has enough juice to move the amounts of packets you need.. but besiddes that then no problem