The MikroTik CRS317 will handle all the layer 2 switching needs, while the CCR2004 will handle all routing for the network and out to the rest of the LAN. Two physical NICs are dedicated to a management distributed switch (left), and two will be used for NSX-T (right).

I’m not using vSAN, or that would be on yet another port group and VLAN. Note the NSX-T portion is still under construction, and more will come in the future on that.Īs you can see, my workstation is configured with vSphere using three VLANs for traffic separation. The diagram below shows the physical topology of network. My home LAN is on the 10.13.2.0/24 network. I set aside 172.16.0.0/12 for the lab networks. So I had no issues installing ESXi 7.0 U2, and didn’t have to manually install any driver VIBs.īecause I’ll be building up and tearing down nested environments on a regular basis, I wanted all lab gear on their own networks, routed with my home LAN and internet. While the Dell Precision 7920 is not on the VMware HCL, the NIC and RAID card are. MikroTik CCR2004-1G-12S+2XS (12 10 Gbps SFP+ ports) – RouterĪs you can see, this is a pretty beefy lab with one decked out workstation for virtualization, and upstream 10Gb switching and routing. MikroTik CRS317-1G-16S+RM (16x 10 Gbps SFP+ ports) – Layer 2 switch

My single server for nested virtualization is:ĭual Intel Gold 5220R CPUs (2.2 GHz, 48 total pCores, 96 threads)ĥTB NVMe local storage (2x 2TB, 1x 1TB) via MegaRAID 9460-16iĤ port 10Gbps Marvell 41000 SFP+ NIC (via HPE) This post will focus on the network, and configuring my MikroTik switch and router. The hardware will support both VMware and Nutanix hypervisors, including SDN solutions like NSX-T. My previous home lab gear was too old to use for anything useful, so out with old and in with the new! As a result of this new gear, I wanted to publish at least one blog post on the network configuration since it’s no longer just a simple flat network. Very recently I decided to completely re-do my home lab hardware, and really step things up a few notches.

Mikrotik pfsense