VMWARE VSPHERE in a Box - Build a small, efficient Home Lab

I've always found Vmware ESX fascinating. I've worked with ESX 3.5 briefly, but wanted to understand more about it. However, building a lab would be no easy task. The hardware costs would be too much!

Then I stumbled upon this site:

http://xtravirt.com/xd10089

I found that one can install ESX 4.0 within a VM in Vmware's Workstation 6.5.2!! Heck, you can put a small infrastructure on there, containing the following:

2 ESX hosts
1 Windows Server for VCenter
1 iSCSI (Openfiler).

So now I just needed a dedicated machine to do this. I wanted a quad core processor, with approximately 8 GB of RAM. So I did some digging around and found a Gateway DX4200-09 on www.jr.com for $339. It was a short lived promotion and is no longer available at their site. So I'm glad I snagged it up.

It can also be found on http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001NVW8F0 albeit more expensive.

I also purchased an extra 4GB of RAM (since it comes with 4GB installed) from www.newegg.com.

Once all the parts were in, I immediately removed Windows Vista and installed Ubuntu. As I feel linux will make better use of the resources. I need as much speed as I can get.

In my next several posts, I will document how I setup a virtual infrastructure within VMWARE workstation using the guide provided by www.xtravirt.com.