Vsphere Simulator or online training lab

[kiteizenga]

For preparing for there VCP exam most of my co-workers built home labs to practice on. I have no desire to spend the money or the space in my small city apartment.  Is there a VMWare Vsphere simulator or online labs like they have for Cisco certifications? I have googled both phrases and nothing has come up.

[Troy_Clavell]

Maybe it would be worthwhile downloading a 60 day evaluation of VMware Workstation? You can run ESX(i) and vCenter as VM's.  You can also test all components by using something like OpenFiler for shared storage.

[a_p_]

No need to spend a lot of money or use lots of space. If you have a PC or Notebook with a 64-bit CPU and VT support (4 GB RAM should do) you can download a trial of VMware Workstation as well as vSphere and build the environment on virtual machines.

André

[bulletprooffool]

You can build a lab right on your PC / Laptop for free if you have enough RAM to manage it.

Using an online 'lab' is goiung to cost you a few $$$ - there are plenty perfectly good bits of hardware that you could purchase for not a lot of money and allow you to build a lab to your spec.

Recently, techhead had an HP microsoerver bundles for about £150 (pretty cheap really) - and of course you can keep using it after you pass your exam!

[kiteizenga]

I threw that HP Microserver in the HCL and did not find it. Looks like building a lab is the preffered approach just need to find the cheapest hardware.

[Troy_Clavell]

check below as well

http://www.vm-help.com//esx40i/esx40_whitebox_HCL.php

[nerdblurt]

one thing to remember with the HCL it's not 100% there are plenty of systems that can handle running VMware products.

For the home lab your cheapest route would be workstation trial and trial of vsphere, if you don't have the funds to purchase a new system to make a whitebox.