Home Lab Buildout

[Gaprofitt17]

Hey all,

I'd like to build out a vRA home lab setup.  I know some people have used those Intel NUC's, etc..  I'm looking to learn vRA...  Any recommendations or guides?

[mohab_samy]

If you are VMware Partner use Solution Kit un the partner central

[daphnissov]

If you're looking to learn vRA, it might be best to get started with the VMware hands on labs, which are free. Lots of good lessons to learn there.

[carl1]

I like the Dell 310's.

As for licensing, take a look at VMUG Advantage.

Carl L.

[future2000]

Hi,

I would recommend a SuperMicro based server using a X9DRI-LN4F+ board. Using 16Gb DDR DIMMS this can be equipped with 384GB RAM in a single 1U chassis. These take Xeon E5-26xx v2 processors which support ESXi 6.7 and are very reasonable. This is currently the most cost effective configuration for a x86 home lab.

Cheers

[bryanvaneeden]

I'd also say that you could start by using a Hands On Lab. These are free and very large as regards to what you can learn.

Link: VMware Hands-on Labs

The reason for this is that if you want to deploy vRA yourself at home, you would need a large environment since you need a vCenter, ESXi hosts, AD server is recommended, and the vRA server also has two servers. So you would need a lot of RAM which is expensive.