Auxilium Lab Environment

There are few things more important for learning, development and proof of concepts than a good lab environment. The following lab environment is where we test out concepts and test out various different software and services most notably Azure Local.

here is our pride and joy....

Starting at the top

Cato x1500 Socket - As a CATO Networks partner this is our x1500 socket which connects the environment to its nearest Point of Presence and saves us having a rack full of security equipment, giving us a full enterprise SASE solution, where you see a small box I see a NGFW, SWG, SD WAN, IPS, NGAM, TLS Inspection, Private WAN, cloud native solution all managed from a single pane of glass. Its awesome!!

HPE Aruba InstantOn 1960 - This is a mid range Layer 2+ 16 port switch from HPE with a switching capacity of 320GB and a packet processing capacity of 238 Mpps. HPE Gen10 servers are uplinked to this switch and configurations may change depending on what we are testing but that will be called out in the test report itself.

HPE Aruba InstantOn 1930 - This is a mid range Layer 2+ 24 port switch from HPE with a switching capacity of 128GB and a packet processing capacity of 95.23 Mpps. This switch is typically used as an access switch for the office test area and out of band management, it is uplinked to the 1960 over 10GB.

3 x HPE Gen10 DL360 - This is where the majority of tests are run, these are validated Azure Local nodes however we may change the Hypervisor if running other tests on other technologies like XenServer, Nutanix and VMware etc. Each node is exactly the same with a single caveat, the Top node has an Nvidia T4 card, Middle node has an Nvidia A2 card and Node 3 has no GPU installed.

2 x Intel Xeon Gold 6132 3.2Ghz (8 Core)

8 x 16GB DIMMS 2666Mhz (128GB)

1 x BRCM 25GbE 2 Port 57414S Adptr

1 x HPE Eth 10/25Gb 2p 640FLR-SFP28 Adptr

1 x HPE Ethernet 1Gb 4-port 331i Adapter - NIC

6 x 800GB 12GB SAS SSD drives

1 x HPE NS204i-p Gen10+ Boot Controller / 2 x 480GB NVME in hardware RAID 1 for boot volume

The SuperMicro servers are where we host our supporting infrastructure such as Domain controller(s) etc. Its a 4 node Nutanix Community Edition (CE) cluster which if you haven't used then I highly recommend it, Nutanix give the community a great set of features that you can use and test to brush up on Nutanix knowledge. The SuperMicro nodes are great for hosting at home as well.

2 x SuperMicro SYS-5019D-FN8TP

1 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) D-2146NT CPU @ 2.30GHz (8C)

1 x Samsung SSD 860

1 x Samsung SSD 980 PRO 1TB

1 x internal solid state drive mSATA 16 GB

2 x SuperMicro SYS-E200-8D (Bottom 2 in Picture)

1 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU D-1528 @ 1.90GHz (6C)

4 x 16 GB DIMMS (64GB)

1 x Samsung SSD 860

1 x Samsung SSD 980 PRO 1TB

1 x internal solid state drive mSATA 16 GB

That summarises the lab, feel free to reach out of if you have any questions or recommendations based on your own lab and kit there's lots of great solutions out there.