Assistance on Home Lab

[jupam18]

Hi all, I need to make a home lab but my resources are not so good.

Scenario:

I need to install 2 Esxi with Fault Tolerance, Vcenter, Openfiler, Windows Server 2008 (AD, DNS), SQUID, Windows 7 Client and Veeam Backup.

My resources are 1 Desktop and 1 Notebook:

Desktop:

Core i7 3rd gen, 16 gb Ram. 512 SSD

Notebook: Core i7 5th gen, 16 gb Ram and 512 SSD.

Ive tried starting with Esxi 5.0 but it stucks a lot, maybe I am assigning the resources in a wrong way.

Thanks in advance for your help.

[daphnissov]

Sorry, that's just not going to be near enough resources to build your wishlist of infrastructure. You either need more resources or less things to build out.

[jupam18]

Thanks for your anwser, isn't there any way? Even with older versions for Esxi and Windows Server?

[daphnissov]

Older versions of ESXi are going to make it more difficult and not easier. Same thing with Windows Server. If you had a server-class hardware or even better desktop hardware it may be possible. Your desktop cannot run ESXi natively so you're forced to run Workstation. Same thing with your laptop. So you've already lost resources right there. ESXi will have to be nested. Then you'd need to run VMs on nested ESXi. 16 GB just isn't enough for either machine to get all these things set up and running even poorly. You're welcome to try, but you're going to have to make some concessions somewhere to make it work (not use Windows Server; not install Veeam in a VM; not have Windows 7 nested; etc.).

[jupam18]

If I can get to 32Gb ram on each device, may I be able to do it? Or do i have a bottle neck with my processor?

[daphnissov]

If you can get to 32 GB I'd say you have a fighting chance.

[sjesse]

How many cores are in each cpu, if its not at least 4  you'll have alot of issues. If its only 2 you can only have 2 virtual vpus scheduled at the same time, and thats not thinking about the OS. I have a lab I run on a quad core laptop with 32gb of memory and without a lot of tweaking, I peg all 4 cores pretty easiliy. The other issue could be disk io, one ssd thats shared with the os may cause issues, I have two samsung 860 evos in mine and they can't keep up.

The only suggestion I can make is try to use the very mimimum resources for every vm, on thing thats not supported but I know that works is after you install the vcenter appliance is to dial it back to 1 cpu and 5gb of memory, the minimum to deploy it is 2 cpu and 10gb of memory.  It takes for ever to start and may be too much if you add integrations like veam and other things, but I know at least for me it works at that amount.

You could use on aline solution like Ravello Service | Oracle Cloud  as well, you can run nested esxi hosts and you pay by the hour. You can just shut everything down when your done. Sorta ruins the fun of a home lab a bit though because you can't use the resources in it from home.

[jupam18]

Hi sjesse, both have 2 cores, I'm thinking that I may have to talk to the teacher and tell him that it is not possible to do it with our current hardware.