How to divide up resources for a nested lab for VCP

ande0255

Messaged one member directly but wanted to get the virtualization communities input on this, as I see variations on how to dedicate laptop resources, which vary between the available resources on the laptop from guide to guide.

I currently have the laptop I referenced in another thread, having 16GB RAM and a 250GB Samsung 840evo SSD, and wondering if anyone has suggestions on how to split up the resources between 2 ESXi hosts / vCenter server / DC / hosts / etc.

Thanks for any and all responses!

Bloogen

1GB DC (Usually also my iSCSI SAN using Windows Server 2012)
4GB each ESXi Host
4GB vCenter

You then have some left over for your laptop applications or to create a few additonal VMs. If you are using Windows 8 or 8.1 I highly suggest you look into enabling deduplication on your VM volume.

Essendon

Yep I'd suggest what Bloogen has. You could run the Domain Controller on 512MB (2008R2) and I always have but my nested hosts get their shared storage from another VM hence the lower requirement for RAM.

ande0255

Cool the ESXi and vCenter hosts were really what I was looking to confirm. As far as Deduplication, I looked around and it appears there are some different methods, is there any particular method you suggest for Windows 8.1?

Thanks again!

ande0255

After reading a few blogs I think I got what I would need to perform nailed down, would this be run on the hosts in the virtual environment, or on the actual laptop itself? The forums I've read don't elaborate much on doing this for a virtualized lab.

Thanks!

EDIT:

Soon as I posted that, I found the answer in the next blog I dug through

GSXRules

From VCAP Test Track (lab on a lap) | SOSTech
and based on a 16-GB i7 Thinkpad W510

VC 1CPU, 4GB, Win2k3 vCenter 5.0
vCenter, Autodeploy, Syslog, SQL Express
SC02 and SC03 (ESXi 5.0) 2CPU, 3GB
DC 1CPU, 3GB (Win2k8 R2)
AD, DNS, DHCP, NTP, iSCSI target, NFS, scripts to populate observed network
for RDP access to test track, this serves as the initial desktop
VMA 1CPU, 600MB
VUM 1CPU, 2GB, Win2k3, vCenter Update Manager 5.0

Note that this is to duplicate the VCAP5-DCA environment closely, not study for VCP. It's also based on 5.0
If doing it from scratch I would put VUM on the VC server.
Note also that the 2008R2 domain controller is also the shared storage server with NFS installed as well as the iSCSI target software.

ande0255

Cool thanks for the specs, I have mine a bit above those listed so I should be good. I'm running the 60-day evaluation, and was wondering if I take a snapshot of the virtual machines as I create them, can I just reload the snapshots at the end of the 60 days to start over with a fresh server?

Getting a bulk of the VM's spun up tonight, and then the labbing it up begins soon

Essendon

60 day old snapshot? - noooooo! Old snapshots are a VMware admin's nightmare, they chew up space, there's a chance of corruption when you commit them and take a long time to commit. So you dont want to do that in a lab or in production.

If your labbing up v5.0, you can do this to renew your trial without uninstalling. If your labbing up v5.5, then from what I have read you need to reinstall vCenter.

ande0255

It appears that 5.1 is a pain in most peoples bitt to extend without the trial exp date carrying over in the database information, though I will definitely look this up - thanks for the link!

Right now I got the two ESXi hosts spun up, tomorrow will be DC and vCenter, and trying to setup some login info for the ESXi hosts. I wasn't able to log in with the root username / pass I setup during initoal configuration via vSphere client, so I'm assuming that is for later configuration.

Thanks again for the input, you guys rock!

Essendon

Another FYI - trial licenses work a bit differently for ESXi and vCenter. With vCenter, the license is for 60 days, exactly. So from March 19 to May 19. But ESXi trial licenses are 60 days x 24 hours x 60 minutes. If you are not using the ESXi trial, it stops and resumes when you power the machine up. But vCenter's license, like I said, keeps ticking.

jibbajabba

I had a 8GB laptop so really low on resources. At some point I even changed the MSI of the vcenter install so I could install it on Windows 7. Then I had the iscsi software on windows 7 as well. So the host system was vCenter and ISCSI + 2 hosts with 2GB of RAM each and one Linux VM with 256MB of RAM Didn't run brilliantly, but it run ..

Now with 16GB of RAM (and higher RAM requirements for ESXi to begin with) you are certainly in a better shape.

I agree with Bloogen, this is what I would do. In fact, again back in the day, I used Server Core (200 as DC so you could really lower the resources to an almost non-existent

ande0255

Do you guys have any pointers on how to divide up a 250GB SSD to create the separate volume for VM stuff like how much to use, or just to run deduplication over the entire drive (will it negatively impact anything)? I'm brand new to this stuff and deduplication is a bit tricky to get an exact answer on google, and I don't have the money to kill this SSD with experiments at the moment. I am currently nesting on Windows 8.1.