VCP5-DV Lab

n3tadm1n

All,

I just got my VCP Official Certification book and am now planning on acquiring lab hardware. Could you please provide a recommendation for a home lab to get through this book? Total novice at VMware except for installing ESXi for SMB clients. Your help is appreciated.

Thanks,
n3tadm1n

YuckTheFankees

You can use Windows 7 w/ workstation (6GB of RAM needed I believe) to host ESXi for it's basic features..but you will need more heavy duty equipment for the more advanced featurs of vpshere and esxi.

richyfivealive

I went for 2 HP microservers, cost £230 each with a £100 rebait from HP> you can get 16GB of ram in them too

ryrova

I too am also finally beginning my quest for the VCP5 cert. Are 2 servers enough or ideal for a vcp5 lab and are there any recommendations for hardware requirements and lets say if i wanted to scale them for a VCAP after? I will also be using vmware workstation but i prefer handling hardware. My budget will allow for it.

Essendon

Get one beefy machine, 16GB of RAM, quad core, an SSD and you'll be set. You can nest ESXi inside of ESXi with no issues. I have a DL380 G5 server with 32GB RAM and a quad core processor. Doesnt miss a beat running ESXi 5 as the physical OS and then nesting 4 virtual ESXi servers inside of it. The virtual ESXi servers then runs a few VM's each. Shared storage is provided by a Starwind SAN running inside a VM (this VM is at the same hierarchical level as the virtual ESXi servers, there's another VM that runs AD/DNS at the same level). This setup works a treat and is VCAP-sufficient.