Nested ESX in the Cloud

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Hi,

I would like to setup a lab to play around with clustering, vcenter, DRS etc. to save me buying any hardware I was wondering if anyone knows of any public cloud providers that will allow you to run a nested ESX setup with a VM.

 

https://noc.baremetalcloud.com/web.html offer this using the excellent AutoLab software but I would advise playing with your own lab, not only can you break it as you want but it's also a great learning ability to actually install and get hands on.

You don't need much in the way of infrastructure, you can actually get away with running 16GB of ram on a desktop or laptop running VMware Workstation and Autolab to do a complete lab build out.

Autolabs can be found at http://www.labguides.com/

 

What Simon said.

 

Thanks for the links Simon, that very much looks like what i am looking for. I was looking for a quick win today but I am still weighing up my options at the moment after looking into this some more and seeing other home lab setups. I went from looking at old servers on ebay, to greener environments using NUC's or shuttles to powerful laptops/desktops.

Around 7 years ago i built myself a powerful machine for gaming, ive been tempted to build something new every now and again but always thought in the back of my mind how this system still does the job for me even now for what i now use it for (no time for games) and its been more than capable of running 3/4 VM's for playing around with AD/Exchange. However it now looks like ive found something i want to do which could warrant a new PC build.

I've very much been a jack of all trades within my current sys admin role, however ive been given the go ahead to start putting a proposal together to refresh our virtual but quite physical looking topology within one of our datacenters. With this in mind i have been looking towards multi host clusters, SAN's and all the benefits this can bring.

I already have a pile of switches/routers from my cisco labbing at home however i am very much excited with this new project after already seeing some of the features within virtualisation that i wasn't aware of. Maybe i wont be gearing myself up for such a networking future.