Building My Lab

I’m very grateful for the fact that I recently got to put together a functional lab that enables me to build, and test projects and make them available on the public internet if I so wish.

In July 2018 I jokingly said to my boss I wanted to buy two servers off eBay for us to mess around with. He immediately shot back with “Why only two?” and agreed to put in half the money. So before he changed his mind I ordered six HP DL360 G6 servers. Only after I clicked the order button I realized that having six data centre ready servers piled up and humming away on my desk wasn’t going to make me very popular with the general office population.

…And so the idea was born, that the Lab would be hosted in our Virginia data centre alongside our Oracle Platform as a Service.

First of all I would need to sort out connectivity , so I “borrowed” a Fortigate 100D firewall the boss had laying around. That would serve as the Labs core router and Firewall.

The Lab’s firewall and Servers would be connected to the greater network on VLAN’s provided by the Oracle Platform Access switches.

The Oracle Platform has a large block of public IP addresses which is under utilised so I borrowed  small portion of the IP’s and routed them to the lab Firewall. I then had the ability to bring up public IP’s on VLANs inside the the Lab. The idea was to have a small private network for the infrastructure, and one or two larger networks for “guests”. Having public IP’s on everything gave me the ability to be able to expose certain ports or whole applications to the internet if so required.

Here’s the logical diagram of how the connectivity would work.

While I was designing all of this, I’d been doing some research on Metal as a Service and Juju and I decided that’s how I would be managing and provisioning all the infrastructure. I would need a dedicated machine for the MAAS region controller and another machine for the Juju controller. The resource requirement of those two machines would be reasonably tiny, so burning two physical machines from our pool for this purpose would be wasteful, so I “borrowed” two virtual machines from the Oracle Platform.

The last thing to do was to throw everything in the car and do the six hour drive from North Carolina up to Virginia. I took my mate London along to help out with the racking and stacking. Turns out he’s quite the cable Nazi, so everything ended up really nice and neat in the racks. Here’s a pic of the lab in its natural habitat.