Vmware vsphere home lab setup

We can deselect the Power on this virtual machine after creation checkbox because we are going to create the second virtual disk that will be used as a datastore to store files of nested VMs. A virtual machine for installing ESXi 7 is now created. Click Edit virtual machine settings. Hit Next at each step of the wizard to continue. Select SCSI , similarly as you have selected for the first virtual disk creation.

Set GB as the maximum disk size and select Store virtual disk as a single file. Specify disk File. You can set a custom file name for the VMDK file. Now you can see the second virtual disk in the list of the virtual devices used by the virtual machine. Edit the VMX file of this virtual machine and check the model of the virtual network adapter. Read how to install ESXi 7 here in the section 3.

Installing the first ESXi host. If the ESXi 7. After installing and configuring ESXi 7, we create a new datastore on a GB virtual disk, which we have created earlier. See how to create a new datastore here in the section 3. Creating a datastore. 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.

Install vCenter as explained in the section 4. Deploying vCenter Server of this blog post. After installing vCenter you can connect to the ESXi host The first ESXi host The installation process is similar to the installation process of the first ESXi host used in our vSphere 7 home lab. Read also how to upgrade ESXi 6. Deploying a vSphere 7 home lab is affordable for users and computer enthusiasts. The purpose is to get the VMware home lab closer to a real deployment.

At the time of writing the choice went for the ability to segregate different types of traffic and create a sandbox environment for testing vSAN and vVOL among other things. Also the idea to keep all these separate from nested hypervisors and other HCI solutions. So in summary the main purpose for this new VMware home lab is to:.

These are only a few of topics and configurations that will leverage and benefit from the new VMware home lab setup. More will be added, updated and even improved during deployment. How to put all this together? There are different components involved and surely multiple ways to accomplish the end result. The aim is to try to go the extra mile. Trying to reproduce real environments without over complicating the setup.

So this is a sort of scale out vs. The former allows more flexibility and cost control based on the cost for extra hardware. Ultimately this is also the approach for the current VMware home lab. In particular, the building block consists of:.

The current VMware home lab is simply scaling out by adding pertinent hardware in order to provide redundancy at:. The amount of hardware all together might be a bit daunting. In fact, this setup is the result of different components purchased in a span of 3 years.

By using the picture above as a reference, the design idea behind the VMware home lab project is to accomplish the following:. The aim of Domalab. Always open to constructive feedback and new challenges. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam.

Learn how your comment data is processed. I am interested in a new homelab setup. Your setup make me re-think my choices for renewal. Always used VMware Workstation for development..

Does it perform enough. Is it fast enough to run NSX and Automation appliances. Thanks a lot for your comment. I personally leave my homelab always on and I barely noticed big changes to the electricity bill to give you an idea each NUC consumes max 0.

VM backups through Veeam are pretty quick and efficient. Avg VM size is 40GB. Running about 55 VMs and growing. On the other hand if you have a powerful box you could virtualise everything and run nested Hosts and VMs. Otherwise get ready for a big energy bill!

Yeah I know it is very generic.. The beauty of virtualisation is that it allows a very sophisticated scheduling of the resources from the Hosts. SharePoint the same. Of course I did a bit of config on these applications to reduce general consumption. Last but not least: my physical setup is based on a concept similar to a converged infrastructure.

So all the components are the same and configured the same. A virtualised build avoids all this. And yes, the powerbill is a thing. Looks like RAM memory could be a bit of a stretch. I guess from a testing purpose it still should be fine if nested VMs are not consuming too much resources. The rest is taken by other services. Take a look at these resources to have an idea:.

Which NUC model is sufficient for this type of setup? I want to build a home lab and budget is that absolute most important thing at this point. I would probably end up only purchasing one NUC and maybe just one synology to start off with.

Thanks for your comment! Ideally any i5 and higher is recommended. For Storage M. Intel NUCs are a great kit and very popular.

They might be a bit pricey in terms of VM density assuming this is what you are using them for.. Gen8 has base 2. Gen7 has base 1. All these values are for i7 CPUs. Personally I have both 6i5 and 7i7 series and love them.

Also consider Gen11 with Tiger Lake might be available by end of the year. Also consider the beauty of virtualization is effectively scheduling the HW resources between different VMs. Take a look at this link to have an idea of the apps and platform I have installed and run on mine. Thanks for the prompt response. VMware ESXi 6. Hi Julio, Thanks for you comment. Where possible try to go for an i7 family.

DAS storage on each host is not redundant and could be also expensive. I run this list of apps and server absolutely fine on vmdk shared storage. This is also helps keeping low temp inside the NUCs.

Citrix, hyperv and nutanix are all nested in VMware! Remember that we are keeping all of our VMs on the same local subnet. In my lab, I used IP addresses of It also has a section near the end that demonstrates adding the shared storage to each ESXi host.

So get a VM setup with one of these, and add it to your Windows domain. Start the installer and again, we will be following through with all the default options as this is just a lab setup.

You will get to the Database section in the setup soon — choose the default of a SQL Server Express instance for the database. Complete the setup and restart the VM afterwards. Individual ESXi host configurations. We need to get them to match each other identically in terms of setup so that HA and DRS work well between the two host servers.

Feature available in vCenter Enterprise Plus only. Download and install this on your local host PC. Run the vSphere client and login to your first ESXi host using the root credentials you configured earlier — accept the security certificate warning you get when you click Login. Click Next, review the summary page to ensure you are happy, then finish the wizard to complete adding your Shared Storage. Under Datastores in the vSphere client, you should now be able to see your shared storage and the host server will now be able to use this to access and run VMs from.

Tick this adapter vmnic1 , and then click Next. Configure the page as per the screenshot below; give your VMkernel port a manual unused IP address on your network along with your subnet mask i. Here is a summary of our vSwitch0 Virtual Switch configuration:.

VMware Workstation is essentially our physical switch. This configuration would then enable us to use both NICs for the types of traffic we have defined on our vSwitch instead of just one handling active traffic and one sitting in standby mode.

Our final stage of configuration will now take place in vCenter, using our vSphere Client from our local host PC. Below is an example of the hosts file configuration on my Windows 7 PC which is running the entire lab. Note that I added a simple entry for my vCenter server too noobs-vc01 so that I can connect to this name using the vSphere client instead of the IP of my vCenter server.

Ensure that all your lab VMs are powered up — i. You can use your domain administrator account to login with, although best practise is of course to create normal domain users in Active Directory to use for vCenter administration. Before we can add any objects to the vCenter Server inventory, we need to create a datacenter object.

The items visible within the datacenter object will depend on which Inventory view you have selected in the vSphere client.

Now we can give our cluster a name. You can now choose your DRS Automation level. The cluster settings are quite easy to return to and change at a later stage if you would like to experiment with them kind of what the lab is all about really!

So choose an automation level you would like for your VMs. The default is Fully Automated, which means DRS will make all the decisions for you when it comes to managing your host resources and deciding which VM runs on which host server.

Host monitoring essentially monitors for host failures physical, network, etc. Leave this enabled. In a production environment, you should disable this option when performing network maintenance as connectivity issues could trigger a host isolation response which could potentially result in VMs being restarted for no reason at all!

The next page allows you to set some default cluster settings. Leave these at their defaults too. On the next page we see some options for VM Monitoring — leave this disabled.

In our case, we are running virtualized ESXi hosts — therefore their virtual CPUs will all be of the same type as they are all running from one physical host machine, therefore allowing us to keep this feature disabled.

Keep the recommended option for storing the VM swapfile with the Virtual Machine on the next options page, and then finish the wizard.