It is a good solution for your first lab. Taking these two differences together, VMware Workstation is great for building a minimalistic home lab for ones who do not care that much about performance. Still, vCenter Server VM consumes most of ESXi-Host-2 resources, making the overall setup performance even worse. With an architecture like that, I could assign more resource to ESXi hosts.

Instead, I installed vCenter Server on a Layer 2 VM. vCenter Server requires a dedicated ESXi host, but I did not want to add the third entity on Layer 1. You also do not need a laptop for managing the lab as you can administrate the whole thing right from the Layer 0 host.Īnother difference is running only two VMs on Layer 1. On the other hand, you do not need a separate drive to build this environment. You can install VMware Workstation 15 Pro right on top of any OS (today, I use Windows 10), but do not expect to squeeze much performance out of a setup like that. The main difference about this setup is using VMware Workstation 15 Pro as a hypervisor. Its architecture has two major differences from the lab created in the previous article. Let’s take a look at the scheme of the environment that I build today.1 x 1 Gb/s Intel ® PRO/1000 PT Dual Port Server Adapter (LAN).But, I think that it is good to remind you of its configuration anyway.

It is just the same PC that I used before. Here’s the configuration of the PC used for today’s study.

Anyway, it allows building a vSphere lab for free! This being said, the solution is good for this article. Yes, Workstation is a vCenter-like platform, but it has rather limited functionality. Today, I use VMware Workstation 15 Pro – a virtualization platform that supports hypervisor virtualization and allows administrating small VMware infrastructures. Building a virtualized environment with VMware Workstation is a bit different from the scenario discussed before.

Vmware workstation pro 15 faqs