ESXi

Hi all,

I am plan to building VMware Lab in Which I can test most of the features, Can you suggest me cost effective equipment to build labs.

IMO the most cost effective method of building a lab for testing/learning is to use a powerful workstation and with VMware Player or Workstation to build your vSphere environment virtually -

Actually I want to 10 Virtual machines, so I can test the features also, like v motion HA,HeartBeat...

Dell poweredge T310 with 32 B RAM, will it work ? or If I buy Laptop with 32 GB RAM

Whats your opinion ?

If I had a place to put the server (and could afford it), that is what I would do. I don't know if a laptop has the horsepower from a CPU standpoint to have 10 VMs powered on at the same time, and still perform at an acceptable level.

I want to build a Could at home and can access from anywhere so I think its good If I can buy Desktop Server, IF you can guide me which server I have to choose and how much RAM

That depends on the budget.

I would purchase one or two older Dell or HP servers from EBay, with as much RAM in them as possible. I think you could get two Gen2 or Gen3 Dell 1950s for between $500 - $700 total, with 16 GB of RAM each. Those would work. I have used them for dev environments in the past. Shove some large, cheap SATA drives in them if they don't already come with drives, and you'll be all set.

I've done this the way weinstein5 suggests, and it works well, but if I had a place to put it I might also do this with an old Dell 1950 or two purchased from EBay too.