Setting up the Home Lab Environment
The main reason behind building a Lab at Home, like many others also do, is to help me study and learn.
The specification of the hardware I used for the Lab can be found here.
To give you a better understanding of the setup and the nesting that is happening, I have drawn the below diagram. You can see that everything is on a single physical machine running VMware ESXi 6.0 U2, and the picture below represents the logical design of my lab. A physical switch, a physical server, and everything else virtual.
Logical Design
The Main Lab “Infrastructure” Setup
Let’s outline what our basic infrastructure components will be for the Lab.
| Hostname | OS | Description | Hardware |
| vgnosisesx01 | Vmware ESXi 6.0U2 | vGnosis Physical ESXi Host | HP Proliant DL360 G7 |
| vgnosis2k01 | Windows 2012 R2 | vGnosis Domain Controller and DNS | Virtual Machine |
| vgnosisvap01 | Virtual Appliance – SLES 11 | vGnosis PSC (Platform Services Controller) | Virtual Machine |
| vgnosisvap02 | Virtual Appliance – SLES 11 | vGnosis VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance) | Virtual Machine |
| vgnosis2k03 | Windows 2012 R2 | vGnosis VUM (Vmware Update Manager) | Virtual Machine |
| sw01 | Cisco IOS | vGnosis Cisco Switch | Cisco WS-C3750E-48PD |
Networking
Based on best practices and trying to mimic a Production setup, we will separate the different types of traffic as much as possible. For the Lab setup we will need the below VLANs.
| Usage | Subnet | VLAN ID |
| Default | 192.168.1.0/24 | 1 |
| Vmware_Mgmnt | 192.168.2.0/24 | 102 |
| Vmware_vMotion | 192.168.3.0/24 | 103 |
| Windows_Srvr | 192.168.4.0/24 | 104 |
| Linux_Srvr | 192.168.5.0/24 | 105 |
| Desktop | 192.168.6.0/24 | 106 |
| VSAN | 192.168.7.0/24 | 107 |
Based on the above I have created the required VLANs on physical switch (I will post a document on how to create the vlans on a 3750E switch).
I have installed and configured ESXi on the Physical Host vgnosisesx01, and also created the Standard Virtual Switch for the Management Network.
As you can see on the logical diagram at the beginning of the document, we will only use a standard switch for the management network, everything else will be on the vDS (Virtual Distributed Switch).
The configuration of the vDS is done on the vCenter Server, so our next document will be on how to build the PSC (Platform Services Controller) and VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance).
