VMware vSphere Home Lab Setup

The goal of this home lab setup isn’t to provide an environment to run a bunch of virtual machines like enterprise level.  Because we have to run ESXi inside Workstation/Fusion, the focus is on learning VMware vSphere and gets the practical exposer of Virtual Center features.

Hardware Requirements:

• One Desktop/Laptop with at least 16GB of RAM, Dual Core processor, Compatible 1gbps NIC/Ethernet card, 500GB of storage. Also, you need to make sure the desktop/laptop offer virtualization support, needs to be enabled (Intel VT-X) in the BIOS.

Once all your hardware is available, you’ll need to download trial versions of vSphere components. As of now, vSphere 5.5 is the most recently released version, though the basics apply to all the versions. To download the trial versions of these components, you’ll need to create a new login (it’s free when you supply your email address).

Software

• ESXi 5.x: ESXi is the hypervisor from VMware.
• vCenter 5.x: This is the management software that gives you all the cool features like including HA, DRS, vMotion, and dozens more. vCenter can be a Virtual Appliance that you download and deploy, or you can download an installer to put on a Windows 2008 R2 or Windows 2012 server. We recommend using the Windows version first; then, after you gain some experience, you can try to deploy the Virtual Appliance.
• Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012: Required to setup a Domain Control and for Windows based vCenter Server.
• A storage appliance like open filer or freenas. Otherwise download the Microsoft iscsi target software and install on Windows server.
• VMware WorkStation or VMware Fusion, you can download from the VMware website.

Home Labs is consists of below machines in Workstation/Fusion

• Two ESXi servers (4GB Ram Each)
• Windows 2008 R2 Domain Controller (512MB RAM)
• Windows 2008 R2 Server for vCenter Server ( 4GB RAM)
• Local, iSCSI and NFS shared storage machine (512MB RAM)

Architecture for vSphere Home Lab Setup

Steps to make it (for all machines use static IP’s)

1. Install VMware workstation/Fusion in local machine.
2. Open VMware workstation/Fusion, Create a Virtual machine for Windows Server 2008R2. Install OS and promote this machine as Domain Controller.
3. Create two virtual machines for ESXi server, Install ESXi 5.x on both machines. Configure the ESXi servers with IP address in same subnet.
4. Create a Windows Machine for windows based vCenter Server, Install vCenter Server on this machine as domain administrator account.
5. After Successful installation, connect to vCenter Server. Create a datacenter, Cluster and add the ESXi host to the cluster.
6. Configure Shared storage by using storage appliances/Microsoft iscsi target machines.

Now you can use all Cluster level features like HA and DRS. Simple and Cool!