Im now in the process of building up my Virtual Lab (I’m pretty excited about this as I have been out of the Virtualisation arena for a few years, so this will be an opportunity to learn whats new in 6.5 and also have a good play with Hyper-V) – My Home Lab Hardware is now in place and I have upgraded my VMWare Workstation to 12.5 (Current latest version)

The overall plan for my Lab is to run a small vSphere 6.5 and Hyper-V Environment for various reasons (mainly my new role – which i will post about soon) all contained within VMware Workstation.

I have just order VMUG Advantage so I can have the vSphere suite for  year (an ongoing) and I have a copy of Windows Server 2016 which I will be using for a dedicated Domain Controller (And maybe a few other Windows Services for the lab) and to deploy for Hyper-V.

Virtual Machines:

  • Windows Server 2016 – Domain Controller
  • 2 x ESXi 6.5 Servers
  • VCSA Appliance
  • 2 x Server 2016 Hyper-V Hosts
  • FreeNAS (To provide Shared Storage)

Network Overview:

I plan on having some basic Network separation to allow for features such as vMotion, Shared Storage, FT etc..

I have added 5 Internal Networks within Virtual Network Editor, as follows:

Screen Shot 2017-03-08 at 17.32.16

192.168.100.x       VM Network

192.168.101.x        Management

192.168.102.x        Storage

192.168.103.x        FT

192.168.104.x        vMotion

For all of these I ensured that DHCP Wasn’t enabled and they were configured as Host-only

Screen Shot 2017-03-08 at 17.38.12

 

My plan is to break each part into a post – and so will look something like this:

Part 2 – Active Directory Setup
Part 3 – ESXi Deployment
Part 4 – VCSA Setup
Part 5 – vCenter setup
Part 6 – Shared Storage
Part 7 – Hyper-V
Part 8 – MORE TO COME