The MoaC Lab

Caution: Articles written for technical not grammatical accuracy, If poor grammar offends you proceed with caution ;-)

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I have been received a number of questions about the MoaC Lab so I decided to put together an article to cover what the MoaC is.  The MoaC or Mother of all Clouds lab is a project Tom Bonanno and myself (Sid Smith) started to help with sharing information.  The goal is to build a lab that will allow us to build the use cases that everyone wants to learn about.  It’s not about building a lab that has a huge number of resources, but a lab that has a huge number of integrations.  Integrations that that we can document and share with the world.

The MoaC Lab consists of two site.  Site 1 is located in my basement in Harrisburg, PA and Site 2 is located in Tom’s Basement near Atlantic City, NJ.  The two site are currently connected using an IPSec VPN run over NSX.

Site 1 – Harrisburg, PA

Internet Connection – 300Mbps up/down with 13 static IP Addresses

APC Netshelter 32U Rack

(6) HP ProLiant DL360 G5 w/total of 152GB Memory, Dual-Quad Core 2.66 Processors & 342GB of storage shared using vSAN

(2) Custom Build Servers w/total of 192GB Memory, Dual-Eight Core AMD Operton 6320’s and no internal Storage

(1) Synology DS1512+ NAS Server with 15TB of Storage

(2)Cisco SG-300-20 20 Port Gigabit Switches

(4)Ubiquiti 8 Port Gigabit POE Switches

(3)Ubiquiti EdgeMax Lite Routers

(6) 1500Mah APC UPS’s

 

Site 2 – Atlantic City, NJ

Internet Connection – 150Mbps Down / 65Mbps Up

(6) HP ProLiant DL360 G5 w/total of 152GB Memory, Dual-Quad Core 2.66 Processors & 342GB of storage

(1)Cisco SG-300-20 Port Gigabit Switch

(1)Ubiquiti EdgeMax Lite Router

(1) 1500Mah APC UPS

 

The lab is not off to a bad start, however we are seeing the resources going pretty fast.  We currently have the following deployed in the lab and are working on the articles to document the complete setup:

  • VMware vCenter 5.5 U2b
  • VMware vSPhere 5.5 (Booting from USB Drives)
  • NSX 6.1
  • vCOM 5.8
  • vSAN 5.5
  • vCenter Log Insight 2.0.3
  • vCAC 6.1
  • ITBM Standard 1.1
  • Application Director 6.1
  • Infrastructure Navigator 5.8.2
  • Cloud Client 3.0
  • vCO 5.5.2

We are currently working towards deploying the following:

  • Infoblox Virtual Appliance
  • VMware Integrated OpenStack (Can’t share the details here until it’s out of Beta….sorry)
  • vCM
  • Horizon View
  • More to come…….

Once we have all the components installed and configured and have caught up on the how-to’s we will start taking a survey for use cases that you all want to see.  Once we collect the survey’s they there will be a voting process to determine which use cases we will build first.  This is where the real fun of this project begins.  We will be building, documenting and sharing providing how-to’s for these use cases.

 

Here are some photo’s of the Harrisburg, PA Lab:

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(Yes I know I have to clean up some cabling)

In the end we are hoping this will be as much of a learning experience for us as it will be for all of you.  We hope to learn about the use cases you want and need as well as hopefully have some fun and meet some great new people.  Keep checking back as we have starting the writing the How-To’s and there are lots more to come!

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