I use the term “software lab” for a lab built with a virtualization program such as VirtualBox, VMware Workstation, or, in my case, VMware Fusion on a Mac.
This is a useful approach because it lets us run many tests and often make use of the computer we already have.
We can deploy an ESXi server relatively easily and run tests.
In my case, I have a 15-inch 2018 MacBook Pro.
32 GB RAM
6-core i7
1 TB SSD
So I’ve been able to try many things and run the following in my lab:
2 x ESXi (16 GB RAM each)
1 x Windows Server 2016 DC + DNS (4 GB RAM)
1 x TrueNAS for shared NFS (2 GB RAM)
That’s 38 GB of RAM in total—don’t panic.
Keep in mind we don’t use all of the assigned RAM. That’s the advantage of virtualization:
Assigned RAM is not consumed unless it is actually used, so everything is fine as long as the VMs don’t use more RAM than the physical hardware has available.
After deploying vCenter on one of the hosts, available RAM becomes quite limited. For testing, I’ll deploy one or two VMs with Photon OS, a lightweight OS designed for vSphere environments.
https://github.com/vmware/photon/wiki/Downloading-Photon-OS
The network configuration is basic because this is a small test environment. In general, everything is on the same NAT network, with a few exceptions for specific tests.
If you don’t want to or can’t use this kind of hardware, you can install ESXi on a PC or laptop with 16 GB of RAM and run vCenter and one VM on it. The real benefit, though, is being able to simulate a cluster and explore more possibilities.