Building my own lab

[Hermes449]

Hello Everybody

I'm looking forward to prepare a couple of vmware certifications, so I'm considering to build my own lab.

I'm aiming at one physical machine composed of the following parts  : GIGABYTE AM4 X570S AORUS Elite AX

AMD Processeur Ryzen 9 5950X

2 x Crucial RAM 32Go DDR4 3200MHz CL22

3 x Crucial P3 1To M.2 PCIe Gen3

4 x Crucial MX500 2To

Network card : to be determined. You can recommend any.

The main idea here is to run a physical ESXi 8 and to have 3 nested ESXi + one tiny vCenter VMs

Three nested ESXi are for vSAN (maybe even considering a fourth one for ESA).

Each NVME is destined to be passed to a nested ESXi, and same for 3 of the 4 2To SSDs

The fourth 2To SSD will host the vCenter VM files and the 3 or 4 Nested ESXi VM files.

What do you think about this build ? Do you see any error, or anything wrong ? Any incompatibility with Vmware ESX 8 ? What would be the best 1Gb Network Card fully compatible ? I just need 1 port as all will stay within the physical ESXI.

Thank you for your help

[TimVCI]

I have been running a home lab for the last couple of years on a Supermicro E300. Has an 8 core CPU (16 threads) and I’ve put in 128GB or ram. With this I have run up to 8 nested hosts and 2 vCenters. I use this set up to do demos when I teach the VCP / VCAP courses and I’ve been really happy with it. 

You might find that 64GB of ram is too restrictive so I would definitely recommend going for 128GB or more if funds allow. 

[Hermes449]

Thanks for your reply Tim
I was also considering using 128Gb or RAM.

But I know that I won't exceed 4 Nested ESXi and only for preparing the vSAN certification.

The main reason for the 16 cores CPU is that I would certainly dedicate 4 CPus to the physical host (2 for vCenter and 2 for running ESXi ) and leave the reste for the nested ESXI which will run just a couple of VMs at most. 

Basically I was thinking that 32 GB of RAM per ESXi host is a little bit overkill. But I may listen to your advice.

I must say that I can afford a 120€ cost for 64GB more.

[CallistoJag]

I would also always add more RAM if I could, however 64 should be fine. Good example of what you can achieve with just 32GB here: https://williamlam.com/2020/11/complete-vsphere-with-tanzu-homelab-with-just-32gb-of-memory.html 🙂 more RAM just makes it too easy 😉

[vv_piter]

And what are you going to test? Is it only to run some nested ESXi hosts and configure vSAN? Do you want to do any other functional / performance tests or just to have a lab with the vCenter console avaialble to check things, etc?

[maksym007]

Guys, I don't know who still considers building a home lab? With all these electricity bills, does it really make sense? 

What if in September or October - VMware announces vSphere9 with new Hardware requirements? What next? 

If only nested - than its ok. 

[miladme99]

64 GB of ram is not sufficient because when you run a vcenter server it takes most of them . maybe you can use HOL.vmware.com to use existing labs

[jsm79]

It definitely makes sense, IMO. If it's a lab, then it doesn't need to be powered on and running 24/7...

[williambishop]

You might consider buying a used server off of ebay, I've gone through numerous labs over the years. Currently I'm running vmware workstation on a 2 proc server with half a terabyte of ddr 4 and a few tb of ssd's and 8tb of sas. Install windows server eval, good for 6 months, install vmware workstation on it, then nest everything under it. You also almost always get 4 nics (10g in mine) and often will get other nice addons just because you're buying used datacenter gear. For the price of a couple pieces of the gear you mentioned, you can have the whole lab...plus you can tinker with actual hardware

P.S., you might even be able to swing 2 of them, then put esx on both and use a regular computer as your access.