vmware home lab

[Trustmeimadoctor]

Im needing to set up a semi decent vmware home lab. But no idea where to start. I could use one of my old dell r720's but the noise!

but i could use parts from them possibly.

Or would i be better going another direction. I dont want to spend huge amounts

Any ideas?

[tankplanker]

Cheap PC with plenty of RAM and at least two drives is all most people need, it doesn't need any fancy fast processors or anything special.

For work I have a laptop with two internal SSDs with 16Gb of RAM that is perfectly fine for running 3 VMs at once, plenty good enough for customer demos and I'm running a heavy Microsoft stack on that (DC, SQL, SharePoint + other tools).

At home my NAS is capable of running VMs (it has 16Gb of RAM), but obviously that is more expensive than just adding RAM and an extra drive to your laptop.

Other option is to buy a micro server but they work out about the same cost as the NAS route, if not more expensive time you put in a decent amount of RAM. Only worth it if you actually want to play with something like ESX server and learn how to configure that.

I would suggest working out how many VMs you need to run at the same time, add up the RAM requirement for that number of VMs, then add 2Gb. I strongly recommend running everything on SSDs, it will be much more responsive. You will not be processor limited unless you running some real heavy duty data loads or similar, disk and RAM is almost always going to be your first constraints.

[deckster]

Impossible to answer, unless the point of doing this is to get experience in setting up VMWare (in which case "almost anything" is the correct answer).

The important detail missing is what you mean by "semi-decent" - or, as above, what do you actually want to do with it?

[Trustmeimadoctor]

Ok cheers mainly its just for general wintel based learning and exchange at the moment

[Trustmeimadoctor]

I know vmware thats not an issue.

[captain_cynic]

tankplanker said:

Cheap PC with plenty of RAM

This. There is one thing VMWare needs and that is loads of RAM. Especially if running modern WIndows VMs.

Last time I ran a VMWare home lab was on a pair of cheap laptops that had about 8 GB each. Ran OK, well enough for testing purposes. With Exch and supporting inf I'd say you'd need a minimum of 16 GB preferably with 12GB or more per host.

When I spec out a modern VMWare host, I'm usually starting in the 100's of GBs, occasionally a few TBs depending on what the client wants to spend.

[Trustmeimadoctor]

Yeah thats the thing if i use one of my r720's its more than good enough as its been doing it in production for many years plenty of ram and storage, ilo, hardware raid etc but not 24x7 in a house

maybe if i play with the power settings i could quieten them down

[captain_cynic]

Trustmeimadoctor said:

Yeah thats the thing if i use one of my r720's its more than good enough as its been doing it in production for many years plenty of ram and storage, ilo, hardware raid etc but not 24x7 in a house

maybe if i play with the power settings i could quieten them down

Do they need to be running 24/7 in that case?

[Trustmeimadoctor]

Thats a good point they dont !

[independentLee]

VMware

Big-Vee Big-Emm little-doubleyou

[Trustmeimadoctor]

Yes it is indeed

[seveb]

I used some Intel NUCs with 6th gen I5 CPUs, 32GB memory and SSD. You can even test vSAN if you use NUCs with two drives. NSX works with almost anything with Intel NICs. Plenty of horsepower for testing and planning, you can even run modest servers quite successfully and they take up hardly any room, power or irritate the wife as they're so small.