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Hardware

I recently purchased the following gear to setup a home lab for ESXi 5 study and to of course get my VCP5.

Its a Shuttle XPC with 32GB of DDR3 Ram, Intel i7 3.5ghz and a 3TB SATA3 HDD

I already had a HP microserver N40L with 8GB ram – but with more than 2-3 VM’s it would struggle and subsequently frustrate me greatly …. to say the least 🙂

Virtualisation

I intended to run ESXi 5.1 virtualised so I could really test out the features and not be limited by hardware (like the shuttle only having 1 physical NIC)

The only things I needed to change on the physical shuttle host was

• add ‘vhv.allow = “true” > /etc/vmware/config
• Enable promiscuous mode on physical hosts ESXi vswitch
• Select Other x64 bit client for the VM Client

Check out this great blog http://tsmith.co/2011/creating-a-nested-esxi-5-environment/– for further info on nested ESXi setups

Shared Storage

I also wanted a NFS and iSCSI device and after downloading OpenFiler from here  https://www.openfiler.com/community/download

Configure it with as an RHEL x64 – 2GB Ram and 2 IDE Disks and 1vCPU

Then I found the following blogs to setup the OpenFiler shares

NFS: http://jreypo.wordpress.com/2010/11/30/configure-nfs-shares-in-openfiler-for-your-vsphere-homelab/

iSCSI: http://techhead.co/how-to-configure-openfiler-v23-iscsi-storage-for-use-with-vmware-esx/

Cheers

James