VMware vCloud “In A Box” for Your Home Lab

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.

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

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

  2. 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

  3. 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 🙂

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