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My provisioning ratio is currently around 350% so I don’t want to hit the 100% used space mark. And finding spare 15K SAS disks isn’t as easy as I’d hope. I like that I have a great deal of flexibility by having a pool of resources that I can consume with nested installs or natives VMs. I can scratch projects and start over easily.
The most powerful option to test enterprise features and solutions. There are other good reasons to opt for this kind of solution, but as I said, it depends on your needs. An excellent opportunity to learn how to design on a budget (cost-effective solutions) and practice troubleshooting on your unique configuration. This kind of lab is also called a nested homelab or nested ESXi.
VDI-LAB-2018 - Part 1 - Network design and configuration
Don’t tick the check box “Allocate all disk space now” if you don’t want to use thick provisioning. You can set the maximum disk size for more than 40 GB if you have enough disk space on your physical computer. This virtual disk will be used to install ESXi 7.
This is, in almost 100% of the cases, the first step before moving to a more serious and expensive setup. I decided to go the second-hand route as it was so much cheaper and I don’t really care about official support, newer software usually works unless on dinosaur hardware. When studying to take the VCP exam, things started to get a bit frustrating as running a vCenter with just 2 vSphere nodes on 16 GB of ram is cumbersome . For my purposes, the number of workloads and technologies I wanted to play around with outgrew what I was able to do inside VMware Workstation. So, after a few years of running VMware Workstation on several other workstation-class machines, I decided to invest in actual servers. The great thing about a home lab is you are only constrained in its design by your imagination .
PowerCLI – How to execute script remotely on ESXi hosts
Network wise all the custom stuff happens nested with OpnSense and NSX-T, I try to keep my home network as simple as possible if I don’t need to complicate it any further. LabCrasher is a place where IT Professionals can test new technologies in a safe, non-production environment and learn from trial and error. This blog spawned from many years of hands-on-learning and many hours of fixing broken systems, and is now a compilation of guides and fixes. May I present you my network diagram!
That being said, all labs are different. There are many options, and these are based on my experience and research. The essential hardware elements of homelab are computing, networking, and storage.
VMware vSphere Networking setup in a home lab
Next, VMware Workstation will warn that this virtual machine might have been removed or copied. Click I Copied It and your second VMs should be loaded. Similarly, you can edit DHCP settings for VMnet1 and other networks. In order to edit settings, select the VMnet8 network and hit the NAT Settings button. The NAT network allows VMs to connect with each other, a host machine, and for a host to connect to VMs.
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.
IP addresses used in our vSphere 7 home lab
It’s troublesome and even in a lab, will barely get you by. My objective is esxi 7.0 + vcenter and finally my first vm, I will be very happy. I have some issues, with the product download and the license, I could get vsphere for home-lab without retriction but vcenter seems to be under a 60 day trial license only. As many others have stated, I would love to setup a similar lab like yours with my QNAPs 1277s and Cisco switches. One of the next projects in my homelab is to include VSAN, VVOL, NSX and vCloud as there are nice integration features with Veeam.

Housed in a personal space such as a garage, basement, or anywhere your home computer is located. Or remotely in the cloud or an IT lab. DescriptionPlease include a full description of how to replicate the problem you are experiencing.
The idea of a homelab or virtual lab is not new to VMware and has been around for more than 20 years. It is still trendy today, and the need for cost-effective but higher-level equipment has put many enthusiasts off exploring for one. You will receive an email message with instructions on how to reset your password. Failover testing and training as well! I suppose it’s all in what you have in the budget. Just stay away from one big flat network with all your services running on a single subnet.

VMs can access an external network that can be accessed by a host. In order to learn how to build VMware home lab, you need to understand how it is structured. Below you can see a principal scheme of a VMware home lab to be deployed. Select the first option - Use bridged networking. Select Installer disc image file and define the path to the ESXi 7 ISO installation image.
In the Getting Started screen press the Set up icon to configure this appliance as a new vCenter Server. Then the Stage 2 installation wizard is opened. The parameters of this sub-menu must be configured if you wish to upgrade the existing VMware vCenter Server. Skip configuring this category of parameters if you deploy a fresh vCenter instance. Check the datastore configuration summary and select the Finish button to complete the datastore creation. Now you have two VMs on which ESXi servers are installed.
With VMware, you can create a virtual lab environment in your home. This type of homelab is quite popular among programmers learning to code in the latest languages. It also allows for better organization when testing new software before deploying it to production systems. The main idea is to leverage all the new hardware and the nice software features generally used in the enterprise or large deployments. Features like VLANs, LAGs, custom firewall rules, software defined storage, traffic separation and a lot more. These are only a few of the topics this article series will touch upon when it comes down to a VMware home lab.
Configure CEIP. Tick the check box if you want to join the VMware Customer Experience Program. You can use the default vsphere.local domain name. Set the Single Sign On password for administrator and confirm the password. You can skip configuring this category of parameters. Tick the checkboxes near the services you want to allow for this VMkernel NIC.
For downloading and booting ESXi installer from USB, you can visit this post. The network design of VMWare vSphere lab in VMware Workstation. Welcome back to the series, How to setup VMware vSphere Lab in VMware Workstation. On Unable to access AD server using remote desktop + Add User or Group… is grayed out. I have been working on a project with a friend who set up a repository in Gitlab but even though I was able to view all projects on it, I couldn’t really join the repository.
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