{"id":1783,"date":"2023-03-24T16:37:53","date_gmt":"2023-03-24T20:37:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ithinkvirtual.com\/?p=1783"},"modified":"2024-01-06T15:23:52","modified_gmt":"2024-01-06T20:23:52","slug":"nested-vsphere-home-lab-series-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ithinkvirtual.com\/2023\/03\/24\/nested-vsphere-home-lab-series-2023\/","title":{"rendered":"Nested vSphere Home Lab Series 2023"},"content":{"rendered":"

intro<\/h3>\r\n

Hey there!\u00a0 I’d taken a hiatus from writing as my personal life got in the way…got married, had a child, and changed employer(s), just to name a few!<\/p>\r\n

But now I am back, I’ve rejoined VMware now as a Technical Account Manager, and I am looking forward to publishing some new content for the vCommunity and fellow TAMs!<\/p>\r\n

In this series, I will cover how to deploy a fully nested vSphere home lab running on top of vSphere 8.0\/ESXi 8.0<\/a> running on a Dell PowerEdge R720, but the same can be done leveraging VMware Workstation Pro<\/a> or VMware Fusion Pro<\/a>!<\/p>\r\n

Note<\/strong>: Nested Virtualization is not supported by VMware.<\/span><\/p>\r\n

Due to some unfortunate circumstances, my previous lab environment was lost and required a rebuild that, at the time, I hadn’t the time for.\u00a0 Fast-forward about 1-year later, life settled back down, and I finally had the time to start rebuilding my physical<\/em> home lab.\u00a0 I was fortunate to have acquired quite a bit of lab gear over the years, most no longer supported by VMware, but still manage to work with later versions of vSphere and this is the perfect use case for a lab environment!<\/p>\r\n

Now that my physical lab is up and running, I wanted to document the way I typically set up my lab environment but in a nested fashion that I can destroy and rebuild to test VMware products and solutions, without worrying about doing something possibly detrimental to my real lab.<\/p>\r\n

The environment will consist of a virtual router appliance, a domain controller (which will also serve as my jump box for the lab), a VMware vCenter Server<\/a> Appliance, and several VMware ESXi<\/a> hypervisor virtual machines which will be configured to serve up a vSAN<\/a> datastore for each respective cluster.<\/p>\r\n

I will cover how to deploy NSX<\/a>, NSX Advanced Load Balancer<\/a>, vSphere with Tanzu<\/a>\/Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG)<\/a>, and the VMware Aria Suite<\/a> of products.\u00a0 I also have plans for a nested VMware Cloud Foundation<\/a> series after this one so stay tuned!<\/p>\r\n

This is basically a follow-up and updated replacement series to my previously abandoned NSX-T Home Lab Series<\/a> and I may reference certain posts from that series throughout this one…so grab some coffee and enjoy the series!<\/p>\r\n

–virtualex<\/p>\r\n

Home Lab Series (subject to change…)<\/h6>\r\n