I’m a little embarrassed to say that this was what my home network stack used to look like. It was not too bad until it came time to move some equipment and then it quickly became a rats nest!
After upgrading my ESXi server with 128GB ECC RAM and 2 TB of SSD hard drive, I decided it was time to spend some money on a proper rack for my gear.
I also updated my cheap TP-LINK 1G switches with a new 10G switch! Still need to order a bottom shelf and upgrade my NAS and Firewall, but it’s coming along nicely.
ESXi is free once again as of Aug 2025, but you need to have a broadcom account to download the ISO.
SuperMicro’s IPMI and Virtual CD for mounting ISO’s is a game changer. No more formatting thumb drives for ISO’s!
ESXi is running on these (2) Supermicro 32GB SATADOM’s configured in RAID 1. These drives get power directly from the board, so no need for power cables.
Those SATADOM’s are HUGE improvement over the thumbdrive that I had ESXi 7 running on.
After 3 years of not using the server, I pulled this blue thingy out of my server not knowing what the hell it was, turns out it was the boot disk where ESXi was running…..DOh!
Gitlab running in a docker container took all of 10 minutes to get setup
docker run --detach \
--publish 443:443 --publish 80:80 --publish 1022:22 \
--name gitlab \
--restart always \
--volume gitlab_config:/etc/gitlab \
--volume gitloab_logs:/var/log/gitlab \
--volume gitlab_data:/var/opt/gitlab \
--shm-size 4gb \
gitlab/gitlab-ce:latest
Some of my most recent sonic scripts needed to be properly backed up with version control!
Scripts from gitlab have been synced to NetBox
I also setup EVE-NG to run virtual labs. Here it’s running (4) instances SONiC NOS
I actually built my own virtual instance of SONiC, as opposed to downloading someones build.
