In case any of you were wondering, my lab setup is this :-
Asus RT-N66U router running Merlins firmware
Cisco SG300-28 this is the main switch for the lab as is IOS-lite feature set and its low cost make it compelling. It being a L3 managed switch is damn useful if you want to implement VLANS and trunk network ports to servers and storage.
Late 2012 quad core Mac Mini (with thunderbolt 1GBe dongle) upgraded to 16GB of ram and running VMware 5.5u2. This boots vmware from USB and then gets its datastores over the network.
Whitebox home built server powered by a i7-3930K 6 core cpu and 64GB ram, this is the beast box as its water cooled and overclocked. Any VM’s that need serious amounts of per core speed get moved to this to run.
Whitebox home built eight core Avoton server (with 32gb of ram (ASRock C2750D4I motherboard). This boots vmware from USB and then gets its datastores over the network. This server board can goto 64GB’s of ram, but the 16GB sticks are a little pricey. What I love about this server is that its utterly quiet and so can be left on 24/7 without annoying the family 😉
Synology 1515+ NAS This provides the core storage for the Vmware lab (and a lot of the VM’s that run in it make use of various NFS exports from it). The VM’s are contained on ISCSI and NFS (with the synology plugin for vaai support) datastores.
What I love about this nas is that its quiet, expandable, upgradeable, easy to use and yet powerful under the hood. Best of all, it now supports Docker and aside from having to be damn cautious when running 3rd party Docker images due to Docker’s *maturing* security, I can run a lot of handy build software in light weight docker containers on the NAS. Like SVN, Bugzilla, Jenkins, Gitlab, etc.
Infonomicon 
Hey Mike! I have the same Asrock MB. What ESX version has been working for you? I see you have a synology but are you using any of the local SATA ports on the C2750D4I other than to boot?
thanks,
dave
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Hi Dave, I’m running 5.5 u3 (it was u2 when I installed) from a usb3 thumbdrive.
I have two 2tb WD blacks, connected up to the Intel chipset sata ports, installed for local storage. But I mainly boot the vm’s from an NFS datastore on the Synology. Are you running into problems with your setup?
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I was, actually and it was only my mechanical disk. The 2 EVO 850s were fine but my 2TB WD green would disconnect. After working with Asrock support, which really wasn’t that bad, showed that my 2TB disk is starting to fail. It wasn’t a new drive, but it works in my other linux server which made me think it was a MB issue. I was mainly wanting to touch base with you to see if you were having any disconnect issues with mechanical drives. Sounds like you’re not and that is great to hear. Newegg just got more of my money and I bought a 4TB Seagate SSHD. Those WD blacks that you have should work pretty well to host from.
I was able to update my ESX 5.5 to update 3 quite easily with your command. Thank you.
Good talking to you, let me know if you want/need to bounce anything off of me. I’m a network guy so most of my stuff will be on the transport side of things.
-dave
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