Test Environment

If possible it is better to get yourself on a VMware course there are many online training companies (such as Udemy) that provide cheap ways to learn VMWare, I have setup a small test rig that allows me to play around with many of the VMware features, apart from Fault Tolerance (unless you want to spend lots of money) my rig will be able to handle the following

• vMotion
• vStorage vMotion
• Distributed Resource scheduler (DRS)
• Distributed Power Management (DPM)

I have tried to keep my setup as cheap as possible, the only restriction you have is that the hardware must support 64-bit and supports virtualization. The other requirement is the SAN, in this case I have a Synology ds415+ SAN which has 4 x 3TB disks configured in raid 6 (6TB total available storage).

Here is what I have purchased, I paid about £350 for the DELL R620 server and about £200 for the Synology SAN which is still not cheap but cheaper than a VMware course, then a few online courses on Udemy. What I am building is not supported by VMware but it does run well and enables me to learn many of the features that's comes with the ESXi server. The newer versions of ESXi allows you to use nested ESXI servers, this basically allows you to setup ESXI servers inside a ESXI server, this means that you can have a play around with VMWare features such as SRM at a reduced cost.

If like me you don't have access to the VMWare software or temporary licences you can look at purchasing a VMUG advantage membership, this gives you a choice of 1/2/3 year/s licences and access to the software to download, watch out for the special offers as you can get 15% off sometimes, but also remember you get 60 days worth of licencing to start with and that might be generally enough to setup and test any feature that you might want to test.

I have also installed technitum DNS server on my local windows 10 laptop, this allows me to setup a local environment that the ESXi servers can use to retrieve the DNS information.

Networking

I have setup the following networking, I am not going to create a diagram as it is too small of a network. Remember there is only one phyical server all the ESXi hosts will be nested hosts.