VMware Home Lab Build - tips for getting started

The home lab environment is a great tool for getting started learning VMware and other technologies. It provides the basis to spin up workloads and learn at your leisure without worries of disrupting production environments.

There are 5 recommendations I have for you to get started with your VMware Home Lab. They are:

Start out small with the home lab
Invest in good equipment
Buy a VMUG subscription
Leverage the Microsoft Eval Center
Do backup your lab environment

In this overview video, we talk about each of these areas, why they are important, and how you can achieve good results building your own home lab for learning, testing, and other purposes.

Take a look at a few blog posts I have written here:

Tanzu Kubernetes home lab:

Home lab network design:

VMware Horizon Home Lab build:

Home Lab 10 gig network upgrade:

Supermicro VMware Home Lab Automatic Power on and Power off:

Supermicro VMware Home Lab:

[Anuituu]

10:38 Hi, what can we do with VM backup+restore in ESXi (free)?

Is it only available with 3rd party tools?
The NFR is tempting, but also worrying, only a year.

Can we schedule the task?
Thanks for any suggestion.

[naveenmct]

Im looking for building a home lab with single host initially - looking for recommendations as a starter - esxi 8 supportable servers either dell or hp and mainly im looking for 1u based 2nd hand servers - ram minimum looking for 128gb. Any suggestions or recommendations that would very helpful for my homelab

[sachinnautiyal]

What is the desktop computer hardware requirement to install VMware and create a home virtual lab to practice on various servers ( Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, Antivirus etc: )

[richcruz]

Awesome content... Thank you for the knowledge bombs. DO you offer consulting for home/LAB Builds? I really need to upgrade and build this out proper this time. TIA

[alphabanks]

Great video I'm more into nested virtualziation these days on a dedicated server running ESXI 7 as my parent hypervisor. From there I build out virtual ESXI nodes.

[kishankawan]

Can i build a VM without the windows license ? Its for home lab testing so can i get it free or how does it work?

[tflo]

This took way too long to get going. Couldn't even finish the video.

[dazzassti]

Jeeez man get on with it, like watching paint dry. Get to the point!