First time home lab.

Long story short. I am taking a few MS networking classes at a local community to fill out some electives. The classes are online and the labs are gutted and leave a lot to be desired. I want to take the plunge and at least work on the exam 70-680 certification. I have just heard of virtualization a few weeks ago and would like to put together a home lab but on a shoe string budget of $300-500 dollars.

I already have a Q6600 and a few hard drives but could use suggestions on a decent LGA 775 board.

And for software, I have Windows Server 2008 standard, enterprise, and datacenter that came with the MOAC books that I would like to install to help rerun some of the labs on my own.

As for virtualization should I use hyper-v or install ESXi or VM workstation?

Thanks for any suggestions.

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Comments

Everyone

Well the good news is, you really don't need to spend a dime. It sounds like you have everything you need to get started already.

The Q6600 machine you have, do you need to use it for anything else (i.e. is this your main computer), or are you planning to dedicate it to this purpose?

If you're going to dedicate it to this purpose, and you have another system that you can connect to it with, ESXi would be highly recommended. VMware is dominant in the virtualization market, so learning it will certainly be beneficial. If you want to learn Hyper-V or any other competing virtualization technologies, you can actually run them INSIDE of your ESXi environment.

Krones

Thanks for the reply. I would like a dedicated system just for the home lab. The Q6600 is an old proc that I have collecting dust after the mobo fried so I would need to buy a mobo that could support 8GB of DDR3 ram to slap it together. There does not seem to be a lot of LGA 775 boards on Newegg anymore and from the few posts I have read it looks like some mobos offer more/better capabilities than others when it comes to virtualization. I do have my primary cpu and an htpc that I could use to connect with but definitely want a stand alone setup for the home labs.

Would you recommend ESXi or Server 2008 to be installed on a SSD?

Tackle

Krones wrote: »

Would you recommend ESXi or Server 2008 to be installed on a SSD?

ESXi is less than 1GB installed. I would install it on a USB if you have the option (maybe you will with the new mobo). You could use a SSD for one of your datastores (Where your virtual machines drives are located), if you're going to go buy a SSD for this purpose, I'd say your money could be better spent elsewhere, especially in a test environment. 7200k drives will work fine. I notice a little lag with more than 2 or 3 vm's running on a drive though.

spiderjericho

You could get a supermicro server board and 8 GB of DDR2 RAM and you'd have a decent ESXi host. ESXi is free if you go to the VMware site.