Building home lab – concept

Requirements and Recommendations minimum:

  • A computer must have a compatible x86-64 CPU
  • 4 cores CPU
  • 32 GB of RAM

NOTE: It is possible to run your lab with 16GB of RAM, however it will be painfully slow and maybe a challenge to run a nested lab ( using VMware Workstation as hypervisor)

vSphere home lab diagram:

  • Desktop with VMware Workstation as hypervisor.
  • Network bridge connection.
  • Two VMs with ESXi installed.
  • One VM with Windows OS serving as DNS.
  • Few virtual machines hosted on ESXi.
  • vCenter hosted on one of ESXi.
  • As this is home lab, there will be no VLANs, however I will use different IPs for management network, vMotion and if (in the future) I will get SAN, for storage network.

What do you need:

  • VMware Workstation
  • ESXi ISO
  • vCenter ISO
  • Windows ISO (for DNS, but this is optional. If you don’t want to set up DNS, you can set up your lab on IPs only)
  • External storage (optional)

Where to get software from:

  1. Go to Google or any of your favorite search engine and type : vmware esxi download
  2. Click on the link from VMware.
  3. Log in to the portal or create an account:

4. Download your Free Product

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