One of my friends at work was able to get his hands on a few servers and was generous enough to give me one for my home lab. It’s a Cisco UCS C22 server that I am running ESXi 6.5.0 on. My plan is to eventually add more memory to thus, unless I can get my hands on a C220 server.

I’m not familiar with VMware at all, so this was a learning experience for me to get up an running. I was able to create a bootable USB drive off my mac with the ESXi hypervisor on it and was able to install that as the hypervisor. I installed VMware because it was free on their site and has the most support around for running different virtual instances.

I don’t have any screenshots of video of the install because it was done before I thought about creating a blog

I have a few servers setup that I go through. The ones in most use are VIRL, CUCM and CUC. I turn on/off the servers as I need them for various lab purposes, either personal or for work. 

I currently use onboard storage and do raid 0 if I remember correctly. If they fail they fail 🙂 

For networking it’s a simple flat network. I’ll eventually get into a more sophisticated setup, but for my use now, ease if the name of the game.

If you’d like to see more or get some more details. Drop a comment below