Unless you’ve been living under a rock you will have heard two big announcements over the last couple of weeks.

1. vSphere 6 is official. 

2. VMUG advantage now comes with VMwares EVALexperience. 

While the vSphere 6 announcement was expected by the community the EVALexperience was a real surprise, to me anyway. 

What does this mean? Well, in addition to all the benefits that come with a VMUG advantage subscription you now get the ability to use a bunch of VMware’s software for the duration of your subscription. No rebuilds every couple of months which makes your home lab more “stable/persistent”and the list of available software looks quite good.

With each new release of vSphere or SRM or NSX or VSAN or … or … or … a lab becomes more important.

But what do you want out of a lab? Do you want to test new software, create disposable environments, run a permanent infrastructure? I guess its really up to and your budget. For me its important to test new software, do early investigation before I approach work and study. Do I need permanent running infrastructure? Not really. I prefer nested a ESX solution. It suits me and my budget. However there are many instances when you would want a “physical” lab, Consultants for a start.

Anyway, I have only three bits of kit that are really important to creating my home lab.

Laptop –> Switch –> S20

Right, so the S20 I tricked out a bit. It has a full compliment of Ram (24GB), one 500GB SSD and one 1TB SSD. It’s connectivity to the world is through the 1GB interface and it boots from an 8 GB SSD.

The whole lab runs several Nested VM’s. Usually three ESX servers, VSAN, one VCSA and a DC. However it has run four ESX Servers, two windows servers with vCenter and SRM, and two Netapp simulators.

In the next post I’ll step through setting up a nested virtual lab.