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)

• It is recommended that you use SSD but you can use standard HDD. If you have high-performance disk the performance will increase.
• Enable AMD/Intel virtualization in the BIOS:
  • How to enable AMD virtualization in the BIOS
  • How to enable Intel Virtualization Technology in BIOS

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