Introduction

Around the end of my first year of college I knew the general direction I wanted to go within my IT field. That direction was virtualization and data centre jobs. I found after my first virtualization course I enjoyed the endless possibilities of virtualization and cloud environments. The deployment of machines as they were needed on demand and then reduced as that demand also left is incredible to me and how it all works with the other parts of the internet as well. I know this is where I want to go and I wanted to step up my experience with working on virtualization servers as well. This started my journey into the world of homelabs and servers at home.

Planning

I wanted my server to have some heavy work behind it, I wanted to play with all sorts of services and testing the environment from small simple Linux machines to full functioning Game Servers for recreational activities. When planning it out I decided that for my use case, an AMD Threadripper Build was the best way for me to tap the raw potential of this project. The Threadripper processor I went with was Threadripper 2950X; This would give a very stable balance between the number of cores to work with, and overclocked it would provide the speed I wanted for tasks which needed them such as Game Servers. Coupled with 128GB of 2400Hz RAM non EEC memory under the hood components would cover the tasks I wanted to test and deploy in this environment. 

For my operating system I wanted something I could test and get used to overtime as I got better and better at my goals. The operating system I wanted to use was ESXi and with the college I got licenses for this and a VSphere installation I could deploy and practice with. I opted to go with the double USB method of deploying ESXi. Using a RAID 1 and two 32GB USB sticks I deployed the ESXi image to the newly built machine. 

Networking wasn't a major concern at this time, the motherboard I had chosen already contained a 10GBe RJ45 connection port to begin with, only down the road would I look at upgrading and adding that card as needed. 

First Virtual Machines

The deployment went incredibly smoothly, ESXi installed got connected to the network and the first virtual machines were all deployed and installed. One of the first production machines to be deployed on this machine was a VSphere guest machine. I wanted this machine to begin scraping the surface of the entire Vmware capability but also for backup and restoration. Any major machines I wanted to deploy I also wanted the ability to backup and restore as needed as well.  I uploaded various ISOs to the ESXi Server as well. Windows 10, Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2016, and various Linux distributions as well. The very first servers I deployed was a Turnkey File Server. I wanted to test and deploy a very basic virtual machine for the rest of my network. The machine worked and I got the hang of deploying virtual machines quite quickly.

Backup and Restoration

As per the usual of almost all part of the IT world, backup and restoration options should always be deployed in case they are needed at any time and point. For this solution I used a Windows 2019 server and Veeam Community Edition. This Edition is free as long as its not a production network and you get no form of support from Veeam. But for my purposes it was perfectly fine. What I did was deploy it to my machine, specified the database, and then pointed the server towards my VSphere installation. Its important that it is the VSphere installation, this is because ESXi isn't natively suppose to have backup solutions since its a free product; Once pointed in the right direction and some simple tests, I had a whole backup and restoration system for all of the future critical machines I would want to backup as well in the future. 

Conclusion

Overall the deployment went very well with little problems, once my whole solution was up and running it was now a blank canvas to test and play with new tools and services within IT along with host servers for critical and recreational functions outside what school expected me to complete.