I guess lots depends on storage configuration as well Personally I dont see the need for 10Gb or even 40Gb networks for now.

The aim of Domalab.com is sharing with the Community the knowledge and experience gained with customers, industry leaders and like minded peers.

Vmware Esxi Cost Software Defined Storage

Features like VLANs, LAGs, custom firewall rules, software defined storage, traffic separation and a lot more.

Vmware Esxi Cost Series Will Touch

These are only a few of the topics this article series will touch upon when it comes down to a VMware home lab.

The purpose is to create an affordable environment serving as a sandbox for learning and improving main setup in real production environments.

The purpose is to get the VMware home lab closer to a real deployment.

At the time of writing the choice went for the ability to segregate different types of traffic and create a sandbox environment for testing vSAN and vVOL among other things.

Also the idea to keep all these separate from nested hypervisors and other HCI solutions.

So in summary the main purpose for this new VMware home lab is to.

An independent bubble where is possible to play with a copy of the production data without touching the production environment.

Trying to reproduce real environments without over complicating the setup.

Another important aspect is to use a scalable approach simply by replicating the building block.

Ultimately this is also the approach for the current VMware home lab.

In fact, this setup is the result of different components purchased in a span of 3 years.

Naming convention and configurations across the VMware vSphere Host is consistent.

Each traffic uses a separate network subnet and dedicated VLAN.

Each VM Traffic sits on a separate network subnet with dedicated VLANs.

At the time of writing shares the same Management network but uses a dedicated VMnic.

In the future it will use a VLAN configuration different from the primary connection on VMnic34.

I personally love the physical setup as the combination of Intel NUC, network switches and NAS gives you the option to get your hands dirty and understand more about the deployment in all aspects.

I personally leave my homelab always on and I barely noticed big changes to the electricity bill (to give you an idea each NUC consumes max 0.40.5 Kwhday and both NAS 1.4 Kwhday combined).

GB network throughout Mgmt, Backup, VM Traffic, iSCSI, Nested LABs is working like a champ (lowest speed during backup 70MBs top 95MBs).

Vmware Esxi License Cost