I took a position working on VMware recently, I hope to share basic articles I’ve found useful and some personal experiences. The first thing like any geek, you need to setup the environment to learn how things tick!
With VMware workstation, you can actually host an ESXi server within a guest (who knew!). I don’t recommend for production, although for learning how things work or getting certification, it’s perfect.
Nested virtualization (VMware workstation acting as the hypervisor) is sweet. You’ll need a beefy laptop (SSD drive doesn’t hurt) or workstation with decent amount RAM, CPU and some multiple CPU cores. I picked up a desktop with 10 GB of RAM, 6 core processor, 1 TB hard disk.
I setup, definitely was easy, there are plenty of articles on the web doing this same thing.
- Two ESXi servers
- One domain controller
- One vCenter server
Community
Get a account at https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/login. This includes setting up access to the community forums.
Another thing I started doing was TwinBox with the following search syntax
#esxi OR #esx OR #vsphere OR #vmware OR #VMware OR #vcloud OR #vmwareview OR #vmwaretam
This pulls down some great information from Twitter.
Enough for now! Lots to share, and learn. Take care.
Steve