I’ve been ignoring the blog, not the work. Took a bit more time than I would have liked, but I’ve got everything up. Well, except the switch. Not comfortable enough with that yet, so everything is on the same LAN right now.
Just wanted to post about the last week. I decided to have a go at setting up a completely virtualized lab. I used this TechHead article (VMware vSphere ESX: Install, Configure, Manage – Preparing your Test Lab). It’s a little dated, but everything still works as advertised, only version numbers have really changed.
Learned a lot more Vyatta than I expected to have to, learned a bit more about FreeNAS and OpenFiler. Honestly it was a huge pain, and I’m not at all happy with the results. That is mainly because after I finally get things working slowly but surely, I can only run 32-bit VMs inside the vESXis. Which is fine I supposed, just it was never mentioned in the article explaining how to setup a lab for study. Major information oversight.
I’m keeping the VMs around if I decide to pull them out later, but I’ll probably start on another route for the time being. I’ll try to post over the next few days about my experiences this week.
Hi, lack of nested 64-bit guest support shouldn’t affect the guts of a virtual lab (for VCP410 training) as vCentre can be run as a 1st-level VM. Also, since writing the TechHead article I’ve moved away from FreeNAS etc to ‘vanilla’ NFS on Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora. These can provide high performance, stable storage with minimal hardware or effort – see http://blog.peacon.co.uk/esx-lab-hardware-shared-storage/. Cheers!
So ESXi (what version) runs without issues on the P7F-X? Why the 32bit limitation?
The only issue I had with the board was network support. I had overlooked that a server-class board might not have drivers, and had to build a custom ISO. Not a big deal for a home lab.
Not sure of the technical reasons for the 32-bit nested limitation, just know that it exists.