Lab overview

The lab environment is built with a mix of virtual machines and three physical nodes.

The physical nodes will be used as the compute / hypervisor hosts in this setup.

The physical nodes are small Intel Nucs with a single-socket CPU and 64 GB RAM. The three nodes all have two internal disks, one 500 GB NVMe drive and one 2 TB SSD drive. In addition they have a SSD drive connected through a USB enclosure used for the boot disk. For networking the nodes have one internal 1 GbE port and two USB ethernet adapters.

The virtual machines in this setup is running on a different hypervisor platform.

Lab design

A high level design looks something like this

Some nodes might be built later on, some might not be built at all and different nodes might be added

A note on networking

The lab will use a simple VLAN backed network setup, aka Provider networks.

A note on storage

At first the nodes will make use of their internal disks for storage. There'll be no shared storage.

Later on the plan is to include both shared storage from a NAS through iSCSI, as well as implementing ceph on the compute nodes