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snakefood

snakefood

snakefood

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Hi guys,

Hoping someone can advise me of the easiest option here. I want to setup a VMware test enviroment for learning / studying for my VCP5-DCV exam. I have a reasonable PC, with plenty of ram. I'd like to have both a home test environment, and maybe a guest or two for actual home use.

Would i be best running free esxi5.1 on the physical host, then running a nested environment within it, or chuck on 2008R2, and launch the VM environment via VMware player? Is it possible to run a nested setup via VMware player?
 
I bought 3x HP N40L with 8GB for £120 each and acquired a Dell 2950 for iSCSI storage. You need separate physical hosts if you want to properly play about with HA, FT and vCenter.

MW
 
[RXP]Andy;24756882 said:
That's not 100% true. ESXi 5 Supports nested hypervisors!
Click to expand...

That's not 100% true either, VMware has the ability to nest but it's not supported even in v5.1 :p

MW
 
Mr-White said:
That's not 100% true either, VMware has the ability to nest but it's not supported even in v5.1 :p

MW
Click to expand...

For learning its fine. However, we are not talking about production systems, as you would be nuts to do that.

They used nested VMware ESXi nodes, on my VMware ICS course. :D

Edit: Do you know there is a requirement to take the VMware course before you can take the exam? The exam its self isn't too bad.

This thread may also help: >> http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18406129
 
Last edited:
[RXP]Andy;24757414 said:
For learning its fine. However, we are not talking about production systems, as you would be nuts to do that.

They used nested VMware ESXi nodes, on my VMware ICS course. :D

Edit: Do you know there is a requirement to take the VMware course before you can take the exam? The exam its self isn't too bad.

This thread may also help: >> http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18406129
Click to expand...

Cheers for link to thread, will take a look. Regarding the exam, yes I've done 5.1 ICM so just want to get a decent test rig to swat up with.
 
I have two 8GB RAM, HP MicroServers in a cluster. Work great. Better than I thought although to save RAM I run Windows 2003 for my VM's just because they are lighter than 2008. Each server has 1 FreeNAS running on it which each host connects to for shared storage.
 
Memory and storage space is fine, the only draw back with the HP N40Ls is the CPUs but physically clustering them totally out weighs that limitation.

MW
 
If you have access to a copy of VMware workstation and a sufficiently powerful machine:

http://boerlowie.wordpress.com/2011/11/30/building-the-ultimate-vsphere-lab-part-1-the-story/

I have posted this before in the unofficial esxi thread, it's not my work, just a setup I have copied. I've set it up with 5.0 and 5.1 (you need to tweak it with 5.1, due to SSO being a pain in the ****). There are a couple of other homelab blogs/guides out there, with the limitation on all of them being 64bit FT, but 32bit guests are fine.

Good luck with the studying, I'm currently doing the same, but have lost a bit of traction with mine recently due to a ridiculous amount of work on.
 
I built a whitebox all in one with the prodigy myself, got 4 2tb hdds for storage and 1 1tb datastore for testing, used to use RDM to whatever NAS appliance I was playing with that week. At the moment I am testing hyper-v as that's what we use at work but the great thing about esxi is the ability to pop in the usb with it on, swap the windows hdd for the datastore and off you go. Works great. I did test out nesting on workstation as well which worked very smoothly surprisingly, but having a server meant I could just set up openvpn and have a play when at work. Out of curiosity how much did your course set you back?
 
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