My New HomeLab

Gigabyte Brix
– 8 GB HyperX DDR3 ram for now (another 8GB on its way) Another 8GB has been ordered, bringing me up to 16gb. I’ll be upping the available ram for my Kali install and upgrading my windows 8 to windows 10!
– 16GB usb drive for esxi
– 120GB mSata SSD for local storage
– Gigabyte ethernet
– I run vmware esxi 5.5 on this machine and run a couple of vm’s on it (and storing lots of vm images on my NAS, I dont need 10 vm’s running 24/7 – this is a homelab, not production, stuff will go on when I need it, and ill power them down when I’m done). Currently I have a win8 vm, a centos VM running php, mysql and apache, which is used for general playing with wordpress, etc and a kali linux VM.

ZyXel NSA320S
– I have a Western Digital MyBook (I got it for a good price in a christmas sale a few years ago now) – this was used for time machine backups and general saving of files. The mybook only had one drive, so no safety net if the drive broke..
– I got the NSA320 for £50 with no drives (I have a few drives sitting about that I will use until I can get a couple of 2 or 3 TB WD Green drives for a good price) currently I have a 500gb samsung and the 1tb drive from the westerndigital mybook in the zyxel creating a 500gb usable drive with a 500gb mirror.
– this 500gb is available over NFS and afp
– I can install debian on this if needed, but the software that runs looks good so far, I can even run php5.5 and wordpress on it if needed (I wont, but its nice to know its capable)

5 port gigabyte ethernet switch (cheap netgear unmanaged)
NAS and brix are on their own subnet, and are the only things connected to this switch, other than the router

I’ll be using my existing (crappy) modem router for all the wifi things (until I can upgrade it to something that I can control which software runs [tomato])