Hey Folks,

 

Let's get straight to the point: I am planning to achieve VMware certification (VCP6-DCV) this year. In order to do that I will need access to vSphere lab to play with. What are my options in terms of running this within unRAID - Is it possible? Will it function as a normal vSphere installation?

 

Tried searching but didn't find much..

 

Thanks

 

https://my.vmware.com/en/web/vmware/evalcenter?p=free-esxi6

For certification purposes, don't you think it would make more sense to deploy Vsphere on a physical server, similar to what you will encounter in the real world, rather then on an unRAID box as virtual machine, which you are less likely to encounter in the real world? I can't speak for Vsphere 6, but with 5 it was pretty simple to build an inexpensive box that ran Vsphere natively.

For certification purposes, don't you think it would make more sense to deploy Vsphere on a physical server, similar to what you will encounter in the real world, rather then on an unRAID box as virtual machine, which you are less likely to encounter in the real world? I can't speak for Vsphere 6, but with 5 it was pretty simple to build an inexpensive box that ran Vsphere natively.

 

If need be, I can build a whole new box but I'd rather not do that as I have no real need for two servers. The new physical box would end up gathering dust.

 

At this point I'm thinking of either:

1. Upgrading the CPU in my home server. Installing vSphere instead of unRAID.

2. Turning my desktop into a vSphere server. Pass-through GPU to VM for gaming purposes.

 

Neither option seems ideal so I was wondering if it would be possible to virtualise vSphere instead...

The vmware courses / training all use vsphere running virtually within vsphere (vmware inception) to provide lab sessions anyway - or at least the ones I've been on have

 

So there's no expectation on the vcp side to run it on real tin. Only question would be how well you could run esx in kvm. Vcenter will be ok as it just needs a windows server guest.

 

Don't know the answers to esx in kvm I'm afraid. esx can be picky at the best of times on real tin so it could go either way.Though being honest I would actually tend to agree with buying a new box - and just go and get a little HP microserver, stick esxi on it and then build your vsphere environment virtually in there. Possibly easier in the long run and something quite common to do.

For my VCP I'm running vSphere in VMWare Workstation on my desktop as it has more RAM than my unRAID box (can only get 16GB in a microserver unfortunately). It's simple to do, you just need to add a couple of lines to the VM .xml file before you kick it in for the first time. I'm not at home right now so can't give any more details, but a quick google should find them.

 

I've got 2 ESXi hosts, a vCenter appliance and several Windows/Linux desktops running this way with no issues.

 

SR