VMware

murdatapes

when trying to get more hands on with VmWare, what kind of hardware did you guys installed on? Wondering if I need a play box to install and run it. Getting some calls from some jobs (3 in the past 12 days), but all 3 had VMware experience on it. Wanted to install ESXi. Or whatever is the best choice version to get hands on more. I use Virtual Box now, but I don't see that on any job descriptions

MentholMoose

If you just want to mess around with ESXi, you can install it on mostly any recent system with a 64-bit CPU. The main issue will usually be desktop-oriented on-board NICs not working, so you might need to buy a NIC (pretty much anything Intel will work).

If you have a PC with a 64-bit CPU and VT or AMD-V support, then you can use VMware Workstation 7 and install ESX(i) as a VM. You could even install ESX(i) directly on the hardware, and then install additional ESX(i) VMs.

The lab I used for studying for the VCP consisted of three old white box servers (circa 2006 and therefore cheap). Two had SuperMicro motherboards, quad-core Xeon CPUs (Kentsfield), 8GB RAM, and a bunch of Intel and Broadcom NICs, and were used to run ESX or ESXi. The third had an Asus motherboard and Opteron CPU, and ran OpenFiler to provide iSCSI and NFS storage.