I have seen lots of posts by newly certified VCPs to know how they can create labs for testing and to enhace the knowledge they gained after certification. Creating VM ware "labs" is an expensive thing and not every one can afford. This post of mine is to help those who don't want to spend too much but still want to have Lab where they can create/break/troubleshoot things as they want and experiment things learnt in VCP course.
I started working on VMWare esxi host when 3.0 was about to come in market and after gaining few years of experience I thought of going for certification. This was the time when esxi host 4.5 was much talked about. I would like to thank Mr. Abdullah who was instructor for delivering such good lactures. After completing my certification I wanted to do lot of experiments with HA, vMotion, FT etc. but unfortunately could not find environement. The IT consultant company for which I am working has lots of virtualisation environment but at no client site we are using vCentre. So I made up my mind to buy a new system which can support virtualisation. Boght a new system with following configurations.
Processor - Intel Core i7 2600
M.Board - ASUS Extreme GENE-Z
HDD - 512 gb SATA
NAS device for creating shared storage.
Here is how I created my LAB with two esxi host 4.5 and a vCenter.
-Installed win7 utltimate on 100gb partition.
-Created two primary partition of remaining disks.
-Installed VM ware workstation 8 on one partition.
-Created 3 VMs in VMware Workstation. 1 for windows 2003 with 64 bit VM and 2 for esxi VMs.
-Installed windows server 2003 64 bit on the windows machine.
-Installed esxi 4.5 on each of the other VM. Configured IP and host name for both the hosts.
-Kept documenting stuff and I advise same to you too.
-Once both the Esxi hosts were accessible from another machine LAN, created 2 windows VM in each host.
-Installed vCenter on the windows 2003 server 64 bit which was created on vmware workstation 8.
-Accessed vCenter over the network and added both the esxi host to it.
-Here is your vmware lab ready with two esxi hosts which are being managed from vCentre.
You can do as much as experimentation as you like. If you already have a machine with mother board and processor supporting VT, you can go ahead with creating above lab. If this article of mine is helpful to you do drop your feedback. Please experiment and share your findings which might be helpful for all. Thanks for reading.
