Fresher VCP5-DCV...Home Lab Setup

[dev993]

Hello People,

I recently became the VMware certified professional (VCP550). I had used remote access to the servers which is provided by many websites for a few days for practicing for the exam. However, using it on a long term basis seems to be much costly. Also, I am aware that only earning a VCP certification is not enough for me to get employed, but a fair number of home lab practice hours along with the VCP certification will certainly be helpful for making a positive impact in the job interview. So I am planning to build a small home lab for testing and for practice but I need to keep the cost as low as possible. I would really appreciate if someone could help me out with this.

Thanks.

[a_p_]

I agree, it definitely makes sense to get hands-on experience. Rather than building a physical lab, you may want to consider to build a virtual lab based on VMware Workstation (see e.g. Building the Ultimate vSphere Lab). I'm running such a virtual lab too, and from my personal experience I'd recommend a CPU which allows 16GB (or more) memory and a SSD for the VMs. I never had issues with CPU or disk performance, only the memory (I've go 16GB) is a limiting factor when I'm running multiple VMs simultaneously.

André

[geocave]

I also just completed the VCP5-DCV certification. I found my own home lab instrumental and purposefully built a lab just to practice with.

You don't specifically mention a budget in your original post, but I'll let you know what I did and my reasoning behind the decisions I made.

Basically, I started by picking a processor brand. I went with Intel because I felt that the Core i7 processors hit the right sweet spot between power consumption, speed, virtualization features and memory support.

Then I went to newegg and started looking at the available 'deals' they were offering. I found a great deal on what would have been a gaming package if the system had come with a graphics card, but since I didn't need the system for gaming, I saved a lot of money by relying on the on-board graphics of the i7 chip that came in the package.

Overall the package was about $650, for a gaming case, power supply, Mobo, Core i7-4790 processor, 8GB RAM and 128GB SSD. I also added an additional 16GB of RAM and an additional 256GB SSD. The processor will support an additional 8GB of RAM, and the package I ordered came with a single 8GB RAM stick, so it won't be as expensive to add that last 8GB of RAM. In total I spent a little under $900 for my system. Your processor will probably be around $200 for an AMD and $300 for an Intel to get the features and performance for doing a nested VM lab. I would highly recommend using an SSD, 256GB should be plenty for a lab as long as you are thin provisioning your VMs.

Let me know if you have any other questions or if you have a budget in mind so I can make more specific recommendations.

[dev993]

Thank you so much for the link that you provided. That was very helpful

[dev993]

Hey geo cave,

Its very helpful now that I have the specifications required to build a Virtual Lab. While googling, I came up to this laptop Lenovo Z50-70. It has all the specifications that you told me except for the 256 gb SSD. However, I have an external SSD hard drive which can be connected with it via USB. What do you think of it ?.

Again thanks for your support.

[geocave]

For laptops, I'm one of those 'Apple Guys'. In my opinion Lenovo and Samsung make excellent hardware.

If I was going to use a laptop for a virtualization lab, I would buy the best laptop available in terms of performance and memory (that I could afford), since you can't really do much modification later.

I use my secondary SSD drive in my own box to store my VMs, so you should have no problem placing them on an external drive. The only issue you may be faced with is speed to the interface, I'm not sure how SATA compares to USB3.