Table of Content
In the Virtual Machine Settings window, select CD/DVD, select the Use ISO image file option, and select the ISO bootable installation image . In the ESXi home lab explained in this blog post, the evaluation 60-day license is used for all VMware products. Hence, you don’t need to change anything on this screen. You can see the network configuration you have set while deploying the OVA template. At this step select the Tiny vCenter Server with Embedded PSC option that will be enough for a small ESXi home lab.
On the side, I also have a Gigabyte mini-pc running. That one is installed with an Ubuntu server with K3s running on it . I use it to run a bunch of home automation stuff that are managed by ArgoCD in a private Github repository , that way I can track my change through commits and pull requests. I also use it for CAPV to quickly provision Kubernetes clusters in my lab. Working in infrastructure has been a blast since I went down that route many years ago. One of the most enjoyable things in this line of work is learning about cool tech and playing around with it in a VMware homelab project for instance.
Creating the Perfect Homelab for VMware Admins
You can test this great enterprise-level feature in your own ESXi home lab. Try to ping your nested Linux VM during the migration process to check that there is no downtime. VMware Workstation provides you with a virtual network editor with which you can configure your virtual networks such as NAT and Host-Only networks.
Hardware is expensive and so is electricity, real estate to store it and so on. I decided to go for a Home Lab 4 years ago because of the complete flexibility and control you have over your own environment. You can easily deploy, configure and manage things yourself.
VMware 7.0u1 upgrade part5: the journey from VMware 6.7
You can also make a note of the various networks that we will adding somewhere so that it is not confusing. I think you need to get dirty with the hardware if you want to improve your knowledge in IT. Anyway, the cloud is the future, and the opportunity is there. Usually, you'll access these servers via the cloud provider panel. But also, you could use an Out-of-Band Systems, depending on the server.
I'm new around here and in general with vmware esxi. I would also like to deploy a home esxi server. My initial thoughts is to have vCenter virtualized on the development side, inorder to prevent any impact to the production? Also, what is a recommended way to start the basic setup so that it can be scaled up for future projects. Your ESXi 7 home lab is ready, but continue to read this blog post to finish and have a working configuration of the whole vSphere 7 home lab.
3 Add a VMkernel NIC and a new Port Group for Internet access.
If you are in the VMware dojo, you most likely are interested in testing VMware products. Meaning vSphere will probably be your go-to platform. In which case you will have to think about licenses. Sure, you can use evaluation licenses but you’ll have to start over every 60 days, not ideal at all. The vExpert program and the VMUG advantage program are your best bets in this arena. Another question that is often asked is if you should run everything bare-metal.
After installing and configuring ESXi 7, we create a new datastore on a 100-GB virtual disk, which we have created earlier. See how to create a new datastore here in the section 3.3. The components of our vSphere 7 home lab are shown on the diagram below. Read about VMware vSwitch to learn how VMware virtual networks work. I think we will all agree that our work doesn’t fit within the traditional 9-to-5 as keeping our skills up is also part of the job and it can’t always be done on company time.
I wanted to keep this diagram as simplistic as possible to alleviate clutter. As you can see, the Ubiquiti gear will be used for general home networking and the 3560G will now be the backbone of the lab. It will be responsible for handling all routing and switching for servers and other future gear. In order to add the storage to iSCSI software adapter , first we need to team storage ports/vmnic. If you ever get confused with the VMware network terminology such as physical adapters, VMkernel adapters, and virtual switch… here you have, , just follow the paths. There are many options to build your own homelab with VMware.
Repeat these steps and add a shared datastore which you created on FreeNAS to your another ESXi host. After that, your vSphere configuration will be almost ready to deploy a cluster. Now it’s time to add a shared iSCSI datastore to your ESXi host. Open the Datastores tab and select New datastore . You can see a preview of the Lubuntu VM desktop where the console was opened in order to check the network and install VMware Tools before migration. The virtual machine running state is preserved.
Whenever newer versions are released, I always upgrade to try out new features. Because I’m also a blogger, I study and test procedures to publish them on my blog. This required a better test environment than what I had. Since my computer didn’t have enough resources to allow complex deployments, in 2015 I decided to invest some money and build my own home lab.
It is arguably the most “bang for your buck” in terms of software you will purchase in your VMware homelab project. For around $200 , you can access the full suite of VMware solutions, including vSphere, NSX-T, VMware Horizon, vRealize Automation, vRealize Operations, etc. I have written quite a bit about my home lab environment, detailing hardware and software.
Provide a Lab for testing new solutionsThis is a dedicated network where to test, verify backups and replicas leveraging the Veeam Datalab. An independent bubble where is possible to play with a copy of the production data without touching the production environment. Deploying and configuring VMware Workstation VMs running ESXi, vCenter, FreeNAS in addition to deploying a nested VM running Lubuntu are also explained in detail.
In this part, we are going to overview the ESXi installation and, draft and design the ESXi network for a VDI deployment. We will add and configure vSwitches, VMkernel adapters, and port groups, for the VM network and Storage network. Similarly go ahead and create 5 more such networks and your final setup should look like below. Be sure to uncheck the two options that I have highlighted below.
No comments:
Post a Comment