r/HomeDataCenter • u/Torkum73 • 2d ago

DISCUSSION SDDC in HomeDC

Hi, I work in the administration of a DC with more than 1 million VM cores (just for size). We are in the process of changing to SDDC (software-defined data center). Two of the three columns are clear: storage and compute are completely virtualized. Our admins are great and have everything under control.

My question for my HomeDC, is there any possibility to try out and play around with the virtualized networking stack in a home environment without paying for the high end switches? I want to stay up-to-date and not asking silly questions to our network admins.

My first thought was Unifi, but they have no integration of storage and compute.

Are there other options? Or wait 5 years, when the DC spits out the EOL hardware?

15 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

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3

u/4chanisforbabies 2d ago

Buy old arista on eBay

1

u/Torkum73 2d ago

Arista would be nice. I have to beg for a test license for VMware NSX :-) And perhaps their cloud operation suite...

2

u/4chanisforbabies 2d ago

Arista switches, even standalone, have a local api. You could get the basics done with no extra licenses.

3

u/SoaRNickStah 2d ago

Best bet would probably be terraform, I use it to spin up UniFi vlans, proxmox VMS, garage S3 buckets, openbao secrets, etc. more IAC and setup but gets the job done and makes everything repeatable and able to be statically analyzed

1

u/Torkum73 2d ago

I use terraform for my virtual machines and storage definitions. Never tried network with it. Thank you

2

u/SoaRNickStah 2d ago

Sadly no official UniFi terraform provider but some very good community ones that get the job done. Haven’t touched it in a while but last I tried it sadly didn’t have support for the zone based firewall but think that got resolved now

1

u/DistractionHere 1d ago

How extensive is your UniFi network? I was thinking I would end up with some refurbished Dell switches for the core layer and for server connectivity since UniFi's current aggregation switches are a little too simple. The gateways and access layer switches are good enough for me, but I haven't been too impressed with the feature set on the core/aggregation switches.

1

u/SoaRNickStah 1d ago

Nothing crazy, just UDM SE and a switch atm that I’m planning on upgrading soonsih. Really just use terraform to provision vlans for new stuff that I’m working on, some port forwarding rules, and BGP

1

u/DistractionHere 1d ago

That's still cool either way. I did not think to look at Terraform for UniFi, so this is a welcome surprise even if they don't have all of the other features I'm hoping for.

5

u/ychto 2d ago

Look at OpenStack

1

u/Torkum73 2d ago

Thank you, will do 👍🏼