With the announcement of the changes to VMUG Advantage and finding a good deal, I figured I’d finally build a home lab

Why

So, why am I even doing this? It’s 2025, who even builds a homelab anymore? Well I am! This is of course a very personal thing, but my reasoning was as follows:

• because I probably shouldn’t rely on having permanent access to my customer’s lab
• because sometimes you want something that just lasts a bit longer than an HoL does
• most importantly: because I’m a massive nerd that enjoys tinkering with hardware, and I finally have the budget and space for it

Requirements

Generally, a reasonable way to start with this, is to have a good long think about your requirements. And I did… after I bought the CPU on a very good deal.

My main technical requirement was that I wanted this to run on a single physical host. There were a few reasons for that:

• it saves on power usage (although that is relative, given the more power hungry hardware)
• it saves on the amount of space I need
• Holodeck exists, and should serve most of my needs nicely
• being able to mess around with nested virtualisation lowers the chance of me fundamentally breaking the whole thing, including the stuff that I want to keep around for the longer term

Outside of that, I also was looking to:

• get something that is capable of running the VCF stack
• build the thing myself
• keep my options for future upgrades open
• don’t anger my accountant too much
• don’t anger my significant other at all

That caused me the look into something that would limit the amount of proprietary parts, keep the price down and limit the amount of noise it generates and space it takes up.

Resources used

William Lam’s VMware Community Homelab was invaluable. Through it I came across Raiko Mesterheide’s blog, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t draw a LOT of inspiration from his build. Outside of that, my longtime partner in crime, Maarten Van Driessen and one of my favourite VMUG Leaders, Jens Herremans, suffered through way too much of my rambling and thinking out loud, and both were able to provide me with a bunch of super useful info, both on the hardware to get and the places to buy it. I’m very much out of my depth here, and their advice sped up this whole process tremendously.

Final build and reasoning

• AMD Epyc 7532 (32 cores @ 2.4Ghz): 32 cores should be plenty for the time being, and they are clocked plenty high enough for my needs. Deep down inside, I’m also a bit of an AMD fanboy.

• Asrock Rack ROME2D16-2T: This board is pretty affordable, and offers plenty of features and expandability, with enough PCI-E connectors of all sorts and onboard 10Gbps networking. Additionally it gives me a second socket that will hopefully quench my inevitable thirst for an upgrade down the line.

• Samsung M393A8G40AB2-CWE (64GB @ 3200MT/s): I got eight of these refurbished with a pretty decent discount. 512GB should be enough to get me going. 64GB modules also aren’t as eyewateringly expensive as their 128GB brethren.

• Micron 7400 PRO 1.92TB NVMe M.2: This drive is intended to run Holodeck on and I have no intention of make it highly available, so I was looking for something reasonable fast and reliable. These came up repeatedly during my searches with those parameters. Only downside is that I might have to find a heatsink for it in the near future.

• Transcend MTS800 64GB SATA M.2: Because ESXi needs to run on something, because I couldn’t find any evidence on the motherboard supporting SATADOM and because I had a spare M.2 slot on the motherboard.

• Kingston DC600M 1.92TB SATA 2.5": This were pretty affordable for enterprise drives. They should also offer plenty of capacity for the more “permanent” part of the lab.

• LSI 9300-8i: To run the Kingston drives in RAID1. Like the memory I got this refurbished for a pretty good price as well

• Dynatron A39: It’s a CPU cooler, it keeps this CPU cool. This one is supposedly pretty decent, fits in the case and should be relatively quiet. It is also one of the only ones that directs airflow in the right direction for my build. Most of the discrete SP3 coolers that I came across where aimed at a desktop build and would direct the hot air at a 90 degree into my PSU instead of going out the back of the case.

• Corsair SF1000: This is likely overkill, but I currently use an SF750 in my desktop that I can swap out for this one if I ever get around to ugprading that system. If I don’t, I know I should have plenty of headroom to fill up that second socket as well.

• Sliger CX3170a XL 3U case: I’ve been using a Sliger mITX case for my desktop, and I’ve loved their stuff ever since. This one supports just about ever motherboard size, and has quite a bit of room for PCI-E expansion. The only downsides are the SFX power supply and the lack of hotswappable drives (although it will fit 9 2,5" drives inside. Neither are a problem for me.

• General Devices Rackmount Rail KIT: It’s a set of rails. They fit the case and the rack.

• Arctic P12 Max: These are very affordable and offer an impressive amount of static pressure. I’ve also had nothing but great experiences with Arctic’s products.

I’ve excluded the networking gear and rack from this list below as that was stuff that I’d be getting regardless (although I probably would have gotten a slightly cheaper switch). If you are curious, the whole thing is housed in a Startech 4-Post 12U Open Rack, my main drivers were that it would shrink or expand to any size I needed, and was mobile thanks to the wheels. The lab is uplinked with a TP-Link Omada SG3218XP-M2 switch. The combination of 10Gbps ports for the lab, and 2,5Gbps ports with PoE for the rest of my home network won me over. L3 networking will be handled by an OPNSense instance running on a seperate 1U Topton box.

BOM

The list below lists the prices I paid in euro, without VAT.

Quantity	Item	Total Price	Supplier
1	AMD Epyc 7532 Tray	445,21	LASystems
1	Asrock Rock ROME2D16-2T	729,23	ANAFRA s.r.o
8	Samsung M393A8G40AB2-CWE	1237,60	Renewtech
1	Micron 7400 PRO M.2 1.92TB	129,91	Senetic
1	Transcend MTS800 64GB	46,27	Some random seller on bol.com
2	Kingston DC600M 1.92TB	458,49	Reichelt
1	LSI 9300-8i	59,50	Renewtech
1	Dynatron A39	48,34	Barax
1	Corsair SF1000	184,88	Azerty
1	Sliger CX3170a XL	249,17	Density.sk
1	General Devices Rackmount Rail KIT	112,50	Density.sk
3	Artic P12 Max	29,85	Megekko
	Total	3720,95

Shipping came to a total of about 100 EUR.