VSphere 8.0 on iThinkVirtual™

Nested vSphere Home Lab – Part 3 – vSphere 8.x Lab Deployment

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 20:22:55 -0500

Intro

Welcome back! In my previous post, I covered the deployment and configuration of an Active Directory and Microsoft Certificate Authority server(s) for the nested lab environment.

Next, I will cover the steps used to deploy the nested lab via William Lam’s Automated Nested Lab Deployment script. This script makes it easy to deploy a set of vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) VMs, along with a VMware vCenter Server Appliance virtual machine to manage the nested lab environment.

Nested vSphere Home Lab - Part 2 - Active Directory & Certificate Authority

Sun, 23 Apr 2023 21:05:13 -0400

Intro

Welcome back! In my previous post, I covered the deployment and configuration of a virtual Sophos XG Firewall router appliance to provide routing services for the nested lab environment.

Nested vSphere Home Lab – Part 1 – Sophos Firewall

Sun, 23 Apr 2023 21:03:00 -0400

Intro

Welcome to Part 1 of my Nested vSphere Home Lab Series. In my previous post, I went over the gist of what I plan to do for my nested Nested vSphere Home Lab. In this post, I will cover the setup and configuration of a Sophos XG Firewall Home Edition which will serve as the router for my nested lab environment. My physical Home Lab is configured with Virtual Distributed Switches, or VDS (sometimes seen as DVS) for short, and since this is a nested lab environment that will not have any physical uplinks connected, I will need to create a new VDS without physical uplinks connected to it along with a portgroup for the nested environment and then configure access to the environment from my LAN. This can also be configured on a Virtual Standard Switch, or VSS for short, in the same fashion. All network traffic will flow through the virtual router/firewall to communicate to and from the nested lab. Afterward, I’ll cover the Active Directory Server setup.