The document outlines a practical guide for building an economical VMware home lab, detailing both physical and software components necessary for a fully-functional vSphere environment. It emphasizes the importance of using ESXi over ESX and provides insights on setting up essential services like SQL, vCenter, and View for testing various VMware solutions. While it does not cover every aspect exhaustively, the author shares personal experiences and configurations that successfully facilitate learning and evaluation of VMware technologies.

1. My VMware Solutions Home Labby Brian DrewThere have been many questions from many sources asking the same thing – how can I build an economical but practical home lab to evaluate, learn and test VMware solutions?I built one that I believe, and those that know it believe, meets the requirements quite well without breaking the bank. It is detailed in this slide deck.

2. OverviewPhysical ComponentsSoftware ComponentsNext StepsAgenda The flow of this deck will proceed in the order above. The information in here is not meant to be an exhaustive how-to manual but rather represent what I used to build a fully-functional vSphere environment that allows for testing of many VMware solutions including View, Capacity IQ, Update Manager, and of course vSphere functions like HA, vMotion and DRS. I’ve done it using VMware Workstation with ESX/i as virtual servers as well and that works, to a degree. I discovered that for my purposes a physical, more real-world environment was best.

3. When all is done my core vSphere environment looks like this. You can see that DRS, HA, and vMotion are fully operational. If I had room for another screen shot you’d see that the cluster memory at about 50%. So will this environment do everything – no. Will it do a lot of things – absolutely. Overview

4. Physical Components

5. More detail of network and storagePhysical components continued

6. ESXi 4.1 – don’t use ESX, use ESXiSQL - can use xpress but I use dedicated MS SQL 2008 on a virtual machineAD , DNS & DHCP (for View) – on Windows VM (I point NTP at pool.ntp.org so don’t need my own)vCenter Server – dedicated VMUpdate Manager – if using can install on vCenter server. I build dedicated VM. View 4.6 – I’m a VDI guy so built out View also. You install Composer on the vCenter server. You can see these again in the OVERVIEW slide above. Software components

7. ESXi installation - as servers didn’t come with DVD I used PXE boot, scripted option. More complex but more real-world. Once 1 ESXi server built (or do both at same time, what ever), connect directly to it with vSphere Client to create SQL server. Need SQL running before installing vCenter.Using vSphere Client, connect to ESXi host again and build vCenter server.Suck your ESXi hosts into vCenter. Software components continued

8. Configure/add storage – carve up on external disk if you have it then in vCenter create iSCSI connections and create VMFS datastores or NFS, etc. Configure networking – configure on-board ports as vMotion network and Intel add-on with virtual machine networkCreate cluster, add hosts, enable HA and/or DRSStart testingNext Steps

9. Let me know what questions you might have. Clearly I’ve assumed a lot of knowledge here. All of the detail is in the VMware docs on how to do what. The PXE piece is a bit dicey the first time. You’ll need DHCP and I used IIS for the binaries. You need an TFTP server too. I used Tftpd32. Here’s a screen shot of my PXE boot/scripted ESXi installation environment to help.Next steps continued