Build a Home Lab from MacBook Pro 13.3 2012 model with VCenter and EsXi by Fusion

[ken504]

Hi Guys

Today I build a home Lab  by using  macbook pro 13.3 with 16gb ram icore 2.97 CPU. SSD240 Harddisk but mount the virtual machine via USB3.0 External Hard Disk.

The performace is good. Install the image from SSD harddisk very fast and smooth, Compare I bought the brand new iCore 7 3.7 32gb ram. Installation speed is lose to macbook, the reason I think it is because SSD harddisk.

Very happy about this because can create a very small and portable network environment via VMWare products. Fusion 5.0  is great. feel free to discussion. if anyone interested the skill or questions.

Regards
Ken

[slaclair]

Agreed, I run more than I would expect off my MBP.  I have a 512 M4 SSD so my 8gb of memory becomes the bottleneck after that.

In fusion I run two ESXi hosts, the vCenter, vCloud and vSheild appliances with NFS being hosted natively on OSX.  It handles much more than I would have originally expected.

[JDLangdon]

I just picked up a 13 inch MacBook Pro for Christmas with the intentions of using it for a VMware Fusion Lab.  I thought it topped out at 8GB's of RAM.  What DIMM's are you using to get 16GB's of RAM?

Jason

[TomHowarth]

Jason,  have a read of this blog post, to tell you what to do http://www.gizmag.com/macbook-pro-2011-models-support-16gb-of-ram/18135/.  also the original post has a retina as he has a USB3 port

[JDLangdon]

Thanks Tom.  I don't have the Retina version but at $100.00, that 16GB upgrade is looking attractive.

[RvdNieuwendijk]

I use 2 Kingston 8GB 1333MHZ Modules in my MacBook Pro 2011. Article code KTA-MB1333/8G. I bought them together for around € 100.

[ken504]

I only used corsairs 8g pcz133mzh X2 but it is fast enough without any problem

[TomHowarth]

I am also going to pull out my superdrive to fit in a second HDD/SSD for my VM's

http://www.mcetech.com/optibay/

I can count on one hand with four fingers and my thumb cut of how many times I have used it