Building the Ultimate vSphere Lab – Part 1: The Story

In my search of the ‘ultimate affordable’ Lab setup for VMware VCAP/VCP/… exams, i went through a lot of possible set ups.

In the end, i started to build a powerful desktop pc in which i intend to virtualize my vSphere environment.  The reasons that made me chose a desktop PC running Windows 7 with VMware Workstation 8 to do this:

- Everybody has a pc.  So why not buy a lightning fast pc which makes your daily application work at light speed (email/surfing/office tasks) and gives you a perfect lab!

- While i enjoy playing around with servers, i don’t like them at home…  they are loud, they generate heat similar to a woodstove, they consume electricity like hell and they are always in the way of things…  Plus you have to interconnect them using 5000 miles of cable.  Bottom line: me not like!

- Every VMware Admin knows the benefits of virtualization… So why not virtualize your lab?  It makes it very flexible (play with # NICs, snapshots, clones, …).

- Since quite some people are already VCP, you can finally put some good use to that VMware Workstation license you got

- It’s very easy to suspend all your work (suspend all the VMs aka your whole vSphere environment), shutdown your pc, go to sleep/work/kids/fun and continue the day after.  No electricity wasted, no annoying noises, …

- Since a lot of vSphere features originally were introduced in VMware Workstation, it’s always nice to play around with it.

- With the coming of VMware Workstation 8, you can finally expose VT-x to the VMs, making it possible to run x86 & x64 VMs on your virtual vSphere environment.  This includes VDR, vShield, …

- Finally, it’s cheaper that a hardware setup (maybe not as powerful in terms of performance but it will only host a Lab environment so no big deal for me).

 

So that are my reasons to go for a virtual Lab setup.  On the next post, I’ll discuss the hardware you need for this desktop pc…

 

Building the Ultimate vSphere Lab – Part 1: The Story

Building the Ultimate vSphere Lab – Part 2: The Hardware

Building the Ultimate vSphere Lab – Part 3: VMware Workstation 8

Building the Ultimate vSphere Lab – Part 4: Base Template

Building the Ultimate vSphere Lab – Part 5: Prepare the Template

Building the Ultimate vSphere Lab – Part 6: Domain Controller

Building the Ultimate vSphere Lab – Part 7: SQL Server

Building the Ultimate vSphere Lab – Part 8: vCenter

Building the Ultimate vSphere Lab – Part 9: ESXi

Building the Ultimate vSphere Lab – Part 10: Storage

Building the Ultimate vSphere Lab – Part 11: vMotion & Fault Tolerance

Building the Ultimate vSphere Lab – Part 12: Finalizing the Lab

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