Having a VMware home lab is important to learn products like VMware Cloud Foundation. In earlier posts I’ve already provided a comprehensive description of how to setup such a lab.
In this article, I’m going to have a fresh look on my lab, especially on the foundation of it — the hardware BOM.
I’ve deployed my VMware home lab back in late 2021, with the following hardware (see also this post):
| Component | Details | Price |
|---|---|---|
| ProLiant DL360p Gen8 | 2x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630 v2 @ 2.60GHz 6C/12T 256 GB ECC Memory HP Ethernet 1Gb 4-port 331FLR Adapter Smart Array P420i Controller | 700 € |
| 4x Samsung 1TB SSD 870 EVO | Cheap consumer disks, which work perfectly with the HP array controller | 500 € |
| Total | 1200 € |
If I would build the lab again in 2025, I would probably go for a ProLiant DL360 Gen9. This model is not officially supported with ESXi 8.0, but it runs without problems. You can get comparable models for around 500 – 700 €.
Speaking of hardware compatibility, I had also no problems in upgrading my old Gen8 lab server to ESXi 8.0.
Finally, here are some pictures of my home server rack, and the lab server:
The complete rack:
As you can see, I’m not only hosting my lab server in this rack, but also some other components for my home setup, such as some Raspberry Pis, Intel NUC, and also an HP ProLiant MicroServer G7 N54L at the bottom, which happily serves as a Plex media server for 12 years now (only had to replace the power supply twice during that time).
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