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VMware vCloud “In A Box” for Your Home Lab

Chris Colotti March 16, 2011 vCloud, vSphere 16 Comments

Physical Host Storage Setup:

Now that we have the storage device configured and ESXi installed and the networking all configured we need to add the NAS storage to the physical host so we can use it for various items. We will also mount this networked storage within the nested ESX virtual machines when we get there. Configure a simple iSCSI software initiator to connect to the iSCSI storage. However if you use the dynamic discovery ESX will find the iSCSI avaialble on BOTH the 100 and 120 VLAN so you will need to take one extra step to force iSCSI over the 120 VLAN. The following screens will show these configurations. Be sure to also add the NFS mount point, and for the Iomega device the path for NFS is /nfs/.

About Chris Colotti

Chris is active on the VMUG and event speaking circuit and is available for many events if you want to reach out and ask. Previously to this he spent close to a decade working for VMware as a Principal Architect. Previous to his nine plus years at VMware, Chris was a System Administrator that evolved his career into a data center architect. Chris spends a lot of time mentoring co-workers and friends on the benefits of personal growth and professional development. Chris is also amongst the first VMware Certified Design Experts (VCDX#37), and author of multiple white papers. In his spare time he helps his wife Julie run her promotional products as the accountant, book keeper, and IT Support. Chris also believes in both a healthy body and healthy mind, and has become heavily involved with fitness as a Diamond Team Beachbody Coach using P90X and other Beachbody Programs. Although Technology is his day job, Chris is passionate about fitness after losing 60 pounds himself in the last few years.

16 comments

Matt Meyer
December 9, 2010 at 8:12 pm

Very nice write-up. I’ll be doing something very similar soon and this will come in quite handy for sure.

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dan libonati
February 21, 2011 at 10:11 pm

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?

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- Chris Colotti
  February 22, 2011 at 6:37 am
  
  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
  
  Reply
Brian
November 11, 2011 at 11:18 am

Can you post on how you sized your VMs? (oracle, vESX, etc)

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- Chris Colotti
  November 11, 2011 at 11:22 am
  
  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 🙂
  
  Reply
Matthew Graci
April 20, 2012 at 9:22 am

Chris

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