How to Create a VMware ESXi Homelab – A Complete Guide

Getting Started

The truth is, setting up a homelab requires you to know a little, or more, about home servers, virtualization, and VMs. You also need a budget, as you can’t set up a homelab without splashing money on some hardware that will make the processing “smooth.” More so, you need a reasonable space in the room where you’re setting this up – nothing needs to be clustered.

Hardware Requirements

Building a “perfect” home lab starts with getting a computer system that meets certain specifications. This is to ensure smooth and efficient performance of the setup – for all kinds of testing. Here are the minimum specs expected of a computer (desktop or laptop) you wish to use in setting up a homelab.

• Multicore x64 CPU with at least 1.3 GHz core speed and produced in 2011 or later
• The CPU should be compatible with AMD-V or Intel VT-x virtualization hardware extensions
• At least 18GB of RAM (32GB is best recommended)
• A hard disk drive (HDD) with at least 200 GB of free space (SSD is best recommended)
• Ethernet network adapter
• Windows or Linux OS, x64 version installed on the system.
• VMware Workstation or ESXi

Note: These are minimum specs, if you have a computer with much better specs, that’d be much better. Whether you will use Workstation or ESXi for your homelab will be determined by your system’s CPU.

Software Requirements

Since you’re setting up the lab on a VMware environment, you can either use vSphere ESXi or Workstation. If you decide to use ESXi, you will need vCenter for management access to the virtual machines and to carry out admin-level actions, including running CLI commands.

VMware products are not free, however, they offer a “free trial,” so you can take advantage of this free trial to set up your homelab free, literally – ESXi and vCenter have a 60-day free trial period, which is quite lengthy. On the other hand, VMware Workstation only offers a 30-day free trial, so, ESXi is usually the preferred choice for users on a budget.

Typically, VMware homelab is run on Linux OS, but if you have a Windows system to use, you can run homelab using Workstation and VMware Player – VMware Player is available for free, but with limited features.

Finally, you need to get a server configuration tool like FreeNAS. This will allow you to configure the file server easily on any machine you’re using to run your homelab.

Deploying the ESXi Servers

You can only deploy the servers after you have done the network configuration perfectly. Also, you can use an OVF template to deploy new VMs and ESXi servers to expand your homelab; you can get a nested virtualization OVF template from here.  Now, with a template at hand, you can proceed.

Deploying ESXi Servers in a Nested Environment

• Click on Create/Register VM to launch the wizard, and then deploy the OVF template you downloaded. Select “Deploy a virtual machine from an OVF or OVA file” and upload the downloaded template.
• Edit the configuration settings to match that of your network and server; this includes the IP address, VLAN, gateway, DNS, and the rest of them. Also, you will need to allocate resources (memory and CPU) for each Nested ESXi server.
• Finally, make sure your Network Adapters are connected to the Nested-ESX-Trunk port group.
• Boot the Nested ESXi server and configure it like you did to the Physical ESXi server – using Web UI or DCUI. Enable SSH if need be.

You can follow this guide to deploy as many nested ESXi servers as you wish for your homelab, and then create a cluster for all of them.

VMware Workstation Setup

What we explained above is setting up a homelab with ESXi, which happens to be the preferable choice for quite many people. If you’d prefer using VMware Workstation, here’s how to go about the procedure. This guide will show how to install and run Workstation VM for a homelab setup.

Setting Up a Virtual Machine Running ESXi on VMware Workstation

VMware Workstation lets you create virtual machines for experimenting with various apps and services in your homelab.

• Download the ESXi 8.0 installer (or the ESXi version you wish to install) from the VMware website. Downloading the ISO file of an ESXi installer is free for VMware account users.
• Create a path to store the virtual machines you’re using for the homelab setup. For example, you can create D:\Home Lab VMs\
• Further, create a sub-path for storing your first ESXi VM files. For example, D:\Home Lab VMs\ESXi8e
• After these prerequisites, click on the “New Virtual Machine” option on the Workstation home screen to launch the VM creation wizard.
• Choose the Custom (advanced) installation method and select your Workstation version for compatibility.
• On the next screen where you have to install your Guest OS, click on Installer disk image file (ISO), and import the ESXi installer you downloaded earlier. Select VMware ESX as the Guest OS, and click on the dropdown menu to choose VMware ESXi 7 as the version.
• Choose a name for  your new VM and select the directory you created for it: D:\Home Lab VMs\
• Assign processor values to the VM, click Next, and set the memory (RAM) value too.
• For the Network Type, select Use Network Address Translation (NAT).
• Set Paravirtualized SCSI (Recommended) as the I/O Controller type and SCSI as the disk type.
• Now it’s time to create a virtual disk; set the disk capacity you want to allocate and select Store virtual disk as a single file.
• Now, save the virtual disk in the same directory you selected for your VM – earlier in this guide: D:\Home Lab VMs\xxxxxxxxx
• Review your settings and click Finish.

Establishing Connection to Shared iSCSI Storage on an ESXi Host

After you’re done setting the homelab, there’s one more step to take, and that is connecting your shared iSCSI storage. The iSCSI protocol allows block-level access to shared storage over TCP/IP networks.

Installing TrueNAS

You need TrueNAS on a VM to create an iSCSI target to connect to the shared datastore. To install TrueNAS, you need to create a new VM and install it inside the VM. After the installation, launch VMware Host Client and log in with your credentials to one of the ESXi hosts.

Configuring the Shared Storage

In VMware Host Client, go to Storage 🡺 Adapters 🡺 Software iSCSI 🡺 configure the available settings and save them.

Now, back to the Adapters menu, click Rescan and Refresh so you can see the new iSCSI software adapter you just created.

To add the shared iSCSI storage, go to the Datastores tab click New Datastore and follow the wizard prompts. Select Create a new VMFS datastore 🡺 select the drive for the VMFS partition 🡺 name the partition 🡺 choose your NAS iSCSI Disk from the list of unclaimed devices 🡺 choose Full Disk as the partitioning option 🡺 use VMFS6 filesystem 🡺 review your selections and click Finish.

Repeat the steps above to add the shared iSCSI datastore to all your homelab ESXi hosts.

Conclusion

Creating a perfect homelab using VMware products isn’t that complex, but you need to know a little about virtualization and VMware products’ guides. This article explains how to use Workstation and ESXi to set up VMware homelab in your studio or home.

Homelabs are set up for experimental purposes and you can have multiple VMs running in the lab. If you run into an error and end up losing some important data, DiskInternals VMFS Recovery can help to retrieve them, and then you can start afresh – again.