This is the sec­ond post in a series out­lin­ing how to set up your own lit­tle vir­tu­al­ized Vir­tual vSphere Lab, if you missed the first one be sure to check it out!

The first step in set­ting up the The Vir­tual vSphere Lab, is mak­ing sure you have every­thing you need. To get every­thing up and run­ning, you’ll need the following:

  1. VMware Work­sta­tion 7.x down­loaded and installed.
    A 30 day trial ver­sion down­load is avail­able at vmware.com (reg­is­tra­tion required)
  2. Instal­la­tion files for VMware vSphere Hyper­vi­sor (ESXi)
    You can down­load it directly from vmware.com (reg­is­tra­tion required)
    Down­load the ESXi 4.1 Instal­lable (CD ISO) (cur­rent ver­sion as of writ­ing) and store it locally.
  3. VMware vCen­ter Server 4.1 and mod­ules
    Down­load from vmware.com (reg­is­tra­tion required)

  4. Win­dows Server 2008 R2 instal­lable media.
    You can down­load a eval­u­a­tion 180 day ver­sion from microsoft.com.
    Be sure to down­load the 64-bit com­pi­la­tion edi­tion ISO file and store it locally.
  5. Shared stor­age solu­tion
    There are a num­ber of options avail­able to you, but the most com­mon ones are prob­a­bly
    Open­filer free and offers both iSCSI and NFS con­nec­tiv­ity
    FreeNAS free and offers both iSCSI and NFS con­nec­tiv­ity
    Stor­Magic SvSAN offers up to 2 TB of iSCSI stor­age in the free ver­sion, and plugs directly into vCen­ter.
    Left­hand VSA the HP Stor­age­Works P4000 Vir­tual SAN Appli­ance comes as a 60 day free trial offers both iSCSi and NFS.
    Cel­erra UBER v3.2 comes as either a VMware Work­sta­tion or vSphere ver­sion, pre­con­fig­ured as a vir­tual machine.

This vir­tu­al­ized ver­sion of the EMC Cel­erra, built by Nick Weaver (@lynxbat) is my choice for this series of posts. Mostly because I’ve played with most of the other options before, but also because the newest EMC Cel­erra offer­ings looks really inter­est­ing and I want to become acquainted with the man­age­ment of it.

So, get your down­loads on and be ready to fol­low part 3 where I’ll walk you through the ini­tial setup and con­fig­u­ra­tion of your own Vir­tual vSphere Lab.

Written by . Christian is the owner of vNinja.net and a Senior Consultant for EVRY ASA, specializing in virtualization. Active twitter user and vSoup.net Virtualization Podcast co-host.