Summary:
Although this article has not detailed the individual configurations of ALL the components the purpose here was to detail out the single server solution to run VMware vCloud Director in your home lab. Once you have these components you can expand on your configuration as you see fit. To date I have also added the following:
- 2nd Domain Controller/DNS
- 2nd vCD Cell for load balancing
- Zeus Load Balancer Virtual Appliance (Desktop Version)
- VMware VMA Appliance
- VMware View for remote access
- IMPORTANT NOTE: Nested VM’s CAN be powered on inside the vCloud Compute cluster but they MUST be 32-bit Operating systems
Although this article has not detailed the individual configurations of ALL the components the purpose here was to detail out the single server solution to run VMware vCloud Director in your home lab. Once you have these components you can expand on your configuration as
Below is a screen shot of all the Virtual Machines running on my single Dell Server. Although not are currently powered up they usually are. I’d say this is a testament to ESXi 4.1 running on a single server with all this going on.
I hope you have found this useful to setup your own home lab for VMware vCloud Director. Please provide some suggestions for ways to improve this article. I’d be happy to edit and add to it as feedback comes in. The nice part about doing all this virtuall is as you want to update and change things you can make use of Snapshots or Templates to quickly deploy new components or update the ones you have.
Very nice write-up. I’ll be doing something very similar soon and this will come in quite handy for sure.
Chris,
i’m going to buy some equipment to build my home lab.. I’m looking at motherboards that have dual socket should i spend the extra bucks for the second processor? My work loads will be vCloud director, Capacity IQ, SQL, ORACLE, vmware view and file server(and some VDI machines for the wife and kid). I also want to use this setup to demo products ad hoc for customer… thoughts?
If I were to do it again I would have gone dual socket, only because the operations on all the nested ESXi servers for imports and VM deployments has started to spike up CPU. However when those operations are done it drops done but consistently runs 25% on the single socket with all the VMs running at idle
Can you post on how you sized your VMs? (oracle, vESX, etc)
Yes I can do that in a couple weeks. I owe an update to this since I added N-1 in my lab to maintain vCD 1.0.1 and 1.5 plus I added vCO, etc. So I have had on my to do list getting an updated post out 🙂
Chris