Stupid question on labbing

mguernsey

I've been researching various lab setups and was curious about setups. Some people (such as myself) have a single dedicated ESXi host for their lab, while others ($$$) have multiple physical boxes/hosts. The third type has VMware Workstation installed on their PC and create their lab inside that.

This got me to thinking, since my ESXi box is also my "production" unit, and frankly now that I've finally got it set up the way I want it the last thing I want to do is screw things up by trying to turn it into a pure labbing system. Instead, could I install VMware Workstation on one of my Windows 7 VMs and create a nested virtual lab inside that?

I'm running an i7-4770 with 32GB of RAM, with two 300GB WD drives in Raid-1, so I'm hoping the system is robust enough to handle a very simplistic environment (two ESXi VMs, a vCenter server, a Windows 2008 R2 DC, and a Windows 2008 R2 SQL Server, and 1-2 VMs to practice vMotion and FT on).

Suggestions or feedback as to the monumental stupidity (or genius) of this idea would be appreciated.

kj0

That should be more than enough on the compute side. I am running an i7-2700k, 16Gb Ram, and a lot of Hard drives but my Vms sit on two Raid 0 SSDs. If you're running Spindles, you will most likely have performance issues once you start up a Guest VM. So, maybe get yourself an SSD and you'll be laughing.


I've been nesting ESXi inside VMware Workstation for a very long time. Haven't had any Issues, I do used Local storage for most of my Vms as I use Openfiler as my iSCSI target and then I created a large datastore so i could at least attempt some expanding tasks/etc. But I don't run Vms off it so I don't see any performance issues on that.

Essendon

My setup is almost the same as kj0's, the only differences are that I have nested multiple ESXi hosts inside the physical ESXi host and use Starwind iSCSI SAN to dish out storage to my virtual ESXi hosts. No performance issues, doesnt miss a beat - this is a DL380 G6 with 48GB RAM and 2 quad-core processors and tons of local SAS storage.

kj0

btw, No such thing as a stupid question.

Check out this guide on setting up a nested environment.

Building the Ultimate vSphere Lab – Part 1: The Story | Boerlowie's Blog

mguernsey

kj0 - I saw that site and was actually following along with it when I made my initial post. Since then I've gone ahead and installed Workstation 10 on my desktop PC (thank you Stanly CC for the downloads!), which has an i5-2500k and 16GB of RAM, and created the lab with ESXi 5.5 and vCenter 5.5. It's a bit tight on the resources, but I managed to make it work.

I'm actually thinking about writing up a newer version of Boerlowie's Ultimate vSphere Lab for 5.5 - there are some slight differences and he left out a few steps or wrote vague instructions that left me scratching my head for a few hours until I did some research and figured out where I went wrong (I'm not knocking the guide - it was incredible, but I get **** about proper and precise instructions).

Anyways, my success in this task has left me itching to do it in a real environment. I'm hoping I can get my supervisor in gear and convince our military leadership that giving us four or five decommissioned servers for a test environment is a better idea than destroying them. It's not like we don't have dozens of them on pallets! Failing that I'm curious to see if I can find a couple cheap servers to buy and use at my place.

kj0

I just did up a quick iSCSI guide for use with 5.5 using Openfiler as your iSCSI target inside Workstation 10. (Blog link in sig.

stryder144

You can find some decent deals on servers on eBay. I normally throw in supermicro server in the search box and I find plenty of pretty decently spec'd computers for around $200-300 each.