[VMwareLAB] – 1.first thoughts

A lot of has been written about building your own VMware LAB, nevertheless, I just wanna share my personal experience and maybe still help someone 🙂

As a VMware enthusiast you, at some point in time had the need to test new products or features from VMware and found yourself without options for it.

Like many of you, I started with VMware workstation on my desktop, building a nested environment to try out simple features but soon realized the resources were just not there and that was the trigger to start thinking about alternatives.

There were a couple of options:

  1. Rent a physical server from an IaaS provider
  2. Use my friend’s lab (I have really nice friends)
  3. Upgrade my desktop to be used as a lab
  4. Buy dedicated hardware

Next step, define the Pros and Cons for each option.

1. Rent a physical server from an IaaS provider

PROS:

  • No need to worry about hardware
  • No electric bill
  • Easy and fastest setup times

CONS:

  • Not budget-friendly, even the cheapest one was too expensive
  • Limited hardware options (RAM, CPU, Disks)

2. Use my friend’s lab

PROS

  • Free or close to free (shared electrical bill)
  • Able to influence hardware upgrades

CONS

  • Be dependent on my friend’s goodwill
  • Don’t have full control of the Lab

3. Upgrade my desktop to be used as a Lab

PROS

  • Full control of hardware
  • Cheaper compared to 1st option
  • Just missing RAM

CONS

  • Hardware limitation (max 64GB RAM)
  • DDR4 it’s very expensive
  • Limit scalability

4. Buy dedicated hardware

PROS

  • Scalability
  • Customizable
  • Dedicated for the Lab

CONS

  • Big initial investment
  • Electic/Internet bill

Verdict

After breaking my piggybank I went for the 4th option.

Next steps are to actually select the hardware and assemble everything…

As always,

Have fun and KISS


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2 responses to “[VMwareLAB] – 1.first thoughts”

  1. […] my choice (good or bad only the future will tell) on my previous post and you can read all about it here it’s time to start the hunt for the hardware. At the end of the post, I’ll have the […]

  2. […] my previous posts (here and here) I talked about what made me decide to go for a physical server, the parts that I selected […]

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