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Other popular options include Raspberry Pi, Intel NUC, servers in a rack, or a remote homelab using an IT lab. A unique solution is a dedicated server in the cloud, but this could be expensive, and you miss the fun part of a lab. Lastly, you might not need a homelab at all, just studying VMware at your own pace; for this, you can use VMware Hands-On Lab.
In a future post, I’ll cover a basic switch configuration and I’ll go through the process of translating the network map above into commands. The router, of course, could be physical, but the idea is to take advantage of virtualization. Before starting any IT solution, even for home-lab, draft your network design first! Knowing the elements to be used is the best start. Elements such as physical and virtual; storage, server, and VM network. Also, visualize the desktop density and configure an IP range capable to cover them all, and leave for extra growth.
Creating the Perfect Homelab for VMware Admins
This may be the steps to replicate, or the data that caused the problem.. Refer to the vSphere networking guidefor guidance on vSphere networking best practices, it includes everything you need and more. It is 2022 and this article still resonates. Size and power consumption and ‘burn in ’ are just a few reasons.
The purpose is to create an affordable environment serving as a sandbox for learning and improving main setup in real production environments. @Amin Masoudifard, thank you for the help, being new to ESXi lab design and the system I am trying to learn. I am interested in what the 'best' layout of resources would be to support a home lab that had production / development. I like the idea of a cluster, but does that mean that I need more hw? Or ESXi installed on bare metal on both servers, with vCenter on one for mgmt? I have a hard time wrapping my head around that.
VMware 7.0u1 upgrade part5: the journey from VMware 6.7
This screen contains multiple menu entries that must be configured. After configuring one menu entry, click another string for configuring the remaining parameters. Drag your mouse over the “i” icon on the right side of the window for reading useful tips.
Select the Installer disk image file and browse the ESXi installer iso file. Download the ESXi 6.7 installer in the ISO format from this page of VMware’s site. You may need to create a VMware account for downloading the installation image; this process is free. Now you have the installed instance of VMware Workstation on your physical computer. The final installation screen allows you to enter a license . Tick the checkboxes if you want to check for updates on startup and join the VMware Customer Experience Improvement Program.
3 Add a VMkernel NIC and a new Port Group for Internet access.
If you are in the VMware dojo, you most likely are interested in testing VMware products. Meaning vSphere will probably be your go-to platform. In which case you will have to think about licenses. Sure, you can use evaluation licenses but you’ll have to start over every 60 days, not ideal at all. The vExpert program and the VMUG advantage program are your best bets in this arena. Another question that is often asked is if you should run everything bare-metal.
I am an IT professional and I often find myself in the situation of implementing new products and configurations without having the right knowledge or tested procedures at hand. I obviously really enjoy the flexibility that automation brings to the table. However, the lack of resources sometimes can sometimes be a limiting factor. I also miss having remote management boards such as HPE iLO, Dell iDRAC or a KVM switch to facilitate hardware operations. In terms of storage, I opted for a separate QNAP TS-251+ NAS with two Western Digital Red 8 TB disks in a RAID-1 configuration. The barebones machines have NVM drives with no RAID protection.
HOME LAB DESIGN (NESTED )
I have 4x 6i5SYH with 32 GB RAM each and 4x 7i7 DNHE with 64 GB RAM each. All VMs use Thin provisioning and are sitting on a iSCSI VMware Datastore on Synology LUNs. Great start and congratulation on the purchase. VMware provides free ESXi which comes with builtin ESXi Web client to manage it. VCenter is available only as a trial for 60 days or purchase. If you dont want to use the trial I would suggest to go for a VMUG advantage which includes for a fixed cost access to many products and lot more.
But to take advantage of these services, you must have an account with a valid email address and a password. You can create a partition on your PC, an external drive. Or just add a dirt-cheap HDD or SSD to an old PC. Later, you can use various free software to manage shared storage, such as FreeNAS. Or use more professional solutions using an iSCSI storage server with Windows. There is no doubt that VMware is one of the best virtualization options and one attractive solution for multi-clouds right now.
The latest to date was my physical ESXi host running on a consumer-grade USB key plugged in the internal USB port, which got fried after a few months of usage. My whole environment was running on this host and I had no backup then. But luckily, I was able to reinstall it on a new USB key and re-register all my resources one by one manually. I also have an old Synology DS115j NAS that participates in the home automation stuff. It is also a target for vCenter backups and a few VMs I don’t want to have to rebuild using Altaro VM backup.
Not every user has a free physical server or servers in the inventory on which to try an ESXi and VMware vSphere enterprise grade virtualization solution. Once the network adapters are created, we need to add them to the ESXi hosts. You can check how to install nested ESXi hosts before you perform this step. VSphere networking includes standard and distributed portgroups offering different feature sets that let you connect virtual machines and vmkernels to the physical network.
Select the newest hardware compatibility version if you are not planning to migrate a VM and run the VM on a host with an older VMware Workstation version. What type of configuration do you want? Click Next at each step of the wizard to continue. If you don’t have SSD, use high-performance hard disk drives . Deploying ESXi VMs on different disk drives increases performance. I have ESXi 6.5 running, and I have a Windows 10 VM which I had imported and inside of this VM there is VirtualBox which is supposed to run a headless Linux VM.
As you can notice, this kind of option is expensive, so considering it as VMware homelab is not for everyone. Or simply expending money on expensive gear is not critical to your financial situation. Hardware is the essential part of a homelab. Homelabs are popular among tech enthusiasts and professionals who do not want to invest in larger-scale infrastructures.
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