Home lab

[hasole]

Hi

I'm currently setting up my home lab so I can sit VCP. Just wondering if anyone has HA, DRS, Vmotion etc working using openfiler as the shared storage.

My setup will be as follows

1x HP DC7100S sff p4 3.4ghz HT, desktop to run esx

1x HP d530 sff p4 2.4ghz, desktop to run esx

1x Whitebox P3-800, 512mb memory running open filer

I have a Gigabit lan, do you think I would require a dedicated network for the iSCSi in a lab environment?

I also have my workstation which is 2xdual core cpu w/ 4gb of ram. Does anyone know if you can install ESX in vmware server (i.e. run my 3 boxes above all as vm's). From memory you can't run VMWare in a Virtual machine.

Cheers.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

You'll be fine running iSCSI without a dedicated network, i.e. sharing a single NIC for the service console, VMs and iSCSI traffic. Given that it's just for testing you could do it over a 100 Mb connection if you really needed to.

While you can install ESX into a VM, you wouldn't be able to get the vmkernel to boot properly so you wouldn't be able to use the VM ESX to run anything.

[xAyiDe]

It is possible to install ESX on Workstation 6.0 and all is working even VMFS. On a moderate computer like yours it would be doable but slow.

Btw using iSCSI iirc it needs to be gigabit to work something with ESX not allowing iSCSI on slow links.