Virtually Sober

Since building my hyperconverged home lab in Jan 2015 and finally sharing it on my blog Jan 2017 it has quickly become the most popular blog post by quite a margin. But one thing has always bothered me about the lab, with 1 SSD per ESXi host, and that’s the connectivity. Stuck in the slow lane at 1GbE it was always the limiting factor when configuring replication between hosts with Zerto and performing an initial sync. This was made even worse when I wanted to plug in a Rubrik r344 appliance (Supermicro 4 node server with 4 x 10GbE cards) because no matter how fast Rubrik can ingest the backup and live mount it back over NFS, 1GbE is as fast as it will go. Demonstrating live mounts over 1GbE certainly works, but it’s not the same wow factor as it is with 10GbE.

Something had to give. Do I build a new lab using motherboards with built-in 10GBase-T NICs? Read more of this post