Home Lab for VMware ESX 3

[Mick99]

Hi

I am intending to create a home lab for myself in order to learn VMware ESX 3 and prepare for the VCP Certification and need advice on the following configuration

• Will two Proliant DL380 G2 be OK for ESX 3?

• What Storage facility can I use? Will Openfiler or a NAS Box be OK?

Any advice!

Many thanks

[Chamon]

Look at p 25 for minimum requirements for ESX 3.

Good luck and enjoy.

www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_301_201_installation_guide.pdf

[Dave_Mishchenko]

You should be OK with the DL 380. It isn't officially supported ( ) but I run some older IBM x335 that would be similar and they work fine. You might want to search the forums to check is see if anyone has had problems with the G2.

If this is hardware you'll be buying, there are also whitebox options that people have gotten to work. VMware is just releasing a new version of ESX and it will have some support for SATA so you may have some PCs around that would also do the job.

Openfiler will work for shared storage. For a NAS server at a minimum you need to have one that supports NFS version 3 over TCP. There are also Windows options if you prefer.

[Abaronov]

For just certification I would suggest running ESX on VMWare workstation. E.g.

Works great. For the ESX shared storage use software ISCSi VM running on the Workstation (I'm pretty sure there are ISCSi appliances in the VMWare library in case you don't want to build it yourself). With any decent hardware (core 2 duo, VTI enabled, ~4 Gigs RAM and 200+ Gig HDD) you can build a decent lab (including Vmotion capable) to play with.

Thanks,

Andrei

[surfup · Accepted solution]

I just bought two DL380 G3 with dual Xeon 3GHZ, 4GB RAM, 2 x 36GB hard drive for $450 + $65 S&H from eBay. So, search eBay for the DL380. I got the first DL380 and installed and configure VI3 3.02 latest build and it work just find. I am planning to use DateCore SANMelody to create an iSCSI target to test the VMotion, HA and DRS.

[Mick99]

Many thanks for your advice