So... following on from Strike-Down's thread here I figured I might as well put together a post explaining my homelab which I use for tinkering about with a whole bunch of stuff, but mostly VMware. I work for a VMware partner, so I need to stay current with all of their stuff and while their Hands On Labs are an excellent resource for stepping through specific scenarios I find that there's nothing like being able to get your hands dirty by breaking and fixing stuff to really get to know a product.
My lab has grown over the years, from an old Dell Poweredge which I think I bought off Moby-Dick in the For Sale threads to it's current iteration which is technically 2 separate labs. One lab environment is just my desktop pc, which runs an i7 2700k (at stock) with 32Gb of RAM. There's a Dell PERC6 which has 5 300Gb 10k WD Velociraptors which I used to use for lab work, but these have largely been replaced with a 500Gb SSD which I use Autolab to build a nested lab on. If you're doing nested virtualisation (essentially running a virtualised vSphere on either a vSphere server, Workstation or Fusion) then I can't recommend an SSD highly enough.
Autolab is a great tool for lab deployment once you have the requirements together (you'll need to download some free media that they can't provide as part of the kit due to copyright).
Ok, so that's the basic nested lab, but what about the "proper" stuff? Storage-wise I recycled an old HP ML115 and installed an HP P410 RAID controller. This is running FreeNAS, and has an Icy-Dock 6x2.5" to 1x5.25" bay converter which has 4x500Gb WD Caviar Blue disks and 2 SSDs for cache (40Gb for read, 120Gb for write). I also have a second ML115 that's powered down most of the time with 4 2Tb disks in, which I use for testing "secondary" storage - ie tinkering with different VSAs so I can learn different storage vendors' interfaces. The compute nodes are 3 Intel NUC devices, each running an i3-3217U at 1.8Ghz and 16Gb of RAM. I was doing some testing with PernixData FVP, so each NUC also has a 60Gb mSATA SSD in it which is currently unused (the FVP license was only good for the 30 day trial which has since expired) so I may have another look at vFlash in order to actually get some use out of them. ESXi is installed on a tiny USB key that hangs out of the back of the unit, but only protrudes maybe 1cm or so (less than the power cable does). The big downside to the NUCs is that there's only a single NIC, so you can't physically separate your storage and management traffic - as such I had to VLAN these off at the port groups and trunk the ports on the switch. The other caveat is that the ESXi 5.5 installer is missing NIC drivers for the NUC, so you need to create a custom installer, though this is easy enough - Alex Galbraith writes a solid how-to at http://www.tekhead.org/blog/2013/01/...-nuc-part-2-2/
I'm using a Cisco SG300-10 switch (you can use a much cheaper one, but I need to get more experienced with the IOS CLI so I figured this one would do the job).
Finally I have an N36L Microserver with 3 local SSDs installed which runs as my "management" box. In a proper environment I'd want a cluster of at least 2 hosts for this role, but space and finances don't allow this at home. This box has 16Gb of RAM installed and is running ESXi from the internal USB port - it has plenty of grunt to run the VCenter Server Appliance, a couple of domain controllers (not sure why I have 2 on there now, to be honest) and a ZenOSS monitoring box.
Backup-wise I use a combination of Nakivo and Veeam (both offer a 2 socket license for eval purposes to VCPs - Here's hoping that "homelab" constitutes eval, or Moby-Dick will be kicking me...) to backup to another HP Microserver running Server 2012, and the Veeam is then replicated to a second box (a Thecus N5200Pro NAS that I bought from Funkstar here a number of years ago).
That's your lot, really. I was going to pull together a Visio diagram with it all in, but I don't have a Visio license at home. If there's any interest I can probably pull it together from work one day. Feel free to ask any questions, or point out where I've made an obvious mistake