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The installation wizard window now appears. Answer the questions provided by the wizard and click Next for switching to the next step. First, check the system compatibility in the VMware HCL and ensure it's supported by the corresponding ESXi version that you need to test. Yes, you can but it's recommended to separate them, even It's possible to install the ESXi in an SD memory or USB disk ... This would be a standalone ESXi deployment as I'm planning to build only a single server for this purpose.
I'm new around here and in general with vmware esxi. I would also like to deploy a home esxi server. My initial thoughts is to have vCenter virtualized on the development side, inorder to prevent any impact to the production? Also, what is a recommended way to start the basic setup so that it can be scaled up for future projects. Your ESXi 7 home lab is ready, but continue to read this blog post to finish and have a working configuration of the whole vSphere 7 home lab.
VMware home lab physical topology
The VM will be the first ESXi host in our VMware home lab. To protect your VMware environment, Altaro offers the ultimate VMware backup service to secure backup quickly and replicate your virtual machines. We work hard perpetually to give our customers confidence in their backup strategy. Do you have limited space or noise constraints? Rack and tower servers are cool, but they are bulky and loud. These small form factor machines are great and offer pretty good performances with i3, i5 or i7 processors.

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.
ESXi network configuration
The VMware HOL has been designed for VMware Academy Instructors, providing them with excellent online technology training tools to use in their classrooms. It is available online, so there is no need to travel or worry about homelab gear. Best powerful option while avoiding bulky configuration. Take the costs of the rack, switches, storage, and other appliances into account; if you plan to use them. In 2020, in the VMware vSpeaking Podcast episode #144, was discussed the topic of Home Labs Powered by vSAN. During this episode, a home lab that costs about $100K was mentioned.
It’s only 1TB but I am currently considering my options to replace it with a more powerful model with more storage. For that reason, I decided to get myself a homelab that would be dedicated to messing around. I started with Intel NUC mini-PCs like many of us and then moved to a more solid Dell rack server that I am currently running. On the software/solutions side, I am on a continuous path to learning new coding and DevOps skills, including new Infrastructure-as-Code solutions.
What is vSphere and how it works?
The first thing I considered was whether it should be bare metal with Rack servers, Network Switches and Storage devices or simply nested virtualization inside VMware Workstation. I went for the nested virtualization route for flexibility and convenience and sized the hardware resources according to what I needed at the time. VSAN disks are not SSD , RAM installed on each host is limited to 64GB and the network speed is 1GB. These constraints are affecting the performance and the number of running machines that are demanding always more and more resources. The lab is currently composed of three nodes cluster running VMware vSphere 7.0.2 with vSAN as main storage. Physical shared storage devices are configured with RAID 5 and connected to vSphere or backup services via NFS or dedicated LUNs.

Furthermore, unlike production infrastructure, you can redesign and repurpose along the way as you see fit. As a result, the home lab can be very fluid for your needs. I would advise anyone thinking of owning and operating a home lab to start small. Running a lab environment inside VMware Workstation, Hyper-V, Virtualbox, or another solution is a great way to get a feel for the benefits of using a home lab environment.
Raspberry Pi OS in a Virtual Machine with VMware
It is way more stable and performance on a 1Gbit Network are great for general homelab use (based on 1Gbit Networks of course!!). As you recall, a second NIC was created for the ESXi VM, but was not configured. Now it’s time to configure the second network interface that will be used by the ESXi host for connecting to shared network attached storage. Read the blog post about VMware vSwitch to learn more. Check the configuration summary for your new virtual machine and if everything is correct, hit Finish. When planning to deploy vSphere 7, don’t forget to configureVMware backup for virtual machines running in vSphere.
However, I am a fan of Supermicro servers for the hardware side of things. I have found the Supermicro kits to be very stable, affordable, and many are supported on VMware’s HCL for installing vSphere, etc. The Cisco 3560G, mentioned above, is a 48 port PoE Layer 3 Managed switch which allows me to enable routing features and VLAN tagging! My main requirements were more gigabit ports, managed layer 3 capabilities, and it must have 48 ports for future connectivity. At the moment, I don’t have any PoE devices connected to the lab, but that may change in the future. This is a CLI only switch, which makes it a perfect platform to practice on.
A better idea is to check vSphere 7 in a test environment before making a decision whether to upgrade your current vSphere version to vSphere 7.0. In this case, you can deploy a VMware home lab on one of the existing computers without erasing any data. This blog post explains how to create a vSphere 7 home lab by using your existing hardware with VMware Workstation installed. When I started my career in IT, I didn’t have any sort of lab and relied exclusively on the environment I had at work to learn new things and play around with tech. So, elaborating a bit more on this option, first, you need to install VMware Workstation to create a base virtualization environment, virtual machines.
VMware vCenter Server and VMware vSphere Web client services must be started. Select the needed service that is not running and hit Start or Restart. You may need to wait for a few minutes. Also check other services if necessary. When the necessary services are running, try to reconnect to your VMware vSphere Client. The Static IP Configuration has already been done by you with the OVA deployment wizard.
Select this option if a VM is located on a shared datastore connected to multiple ESXi hosts. Let’s create a new virtual machine on a virtual ESXi host for VMware home lab. Set the additional properties for this virtual machine.
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.