As you will probably know by now, I’m really into ICT. I mainly focus on virtualization and Microsoft technoIogies. As such, I try to:

• Keep up with new ICT developments
• Improve my knowledge and skills for both old and new ICT technologies
• Get certified in many different areas of ICT.

A proper lab environment is a prerequisite to do so. Because of virtualization however, this has become so much easier (and cheaper) than before.

In the next couple of blog posts I will try to document the steps I’m taking to build my lab. Today I’m staring the series with the hardware selection. The important part of the hardware I use for my environment is as follows:

• Mainboard: Gigabyte GA-H77M-D3H
• CPU: Intel Core i5 3570 quadcore
• Memory: 32GB
• SATA controller : IBM M1015 (flashed to LSI9211-8i)
• VM storage: 2 * 512GB SSD Samsung 830 series
• Non VM storage: 2 * 2TB SATA

To me it was important that my machine would be able to run both Microsoft Hyper-V 3.0 as well as VMware ESXi 5.1 properly. Both have hardware requirements, but VMware ESXi 5.1 is generally more restrictive with regards to supported hardware. Very simply put, it means that the mainboard, CPU, network and storage controller need to be compatible with the features you require.

Normally you would check supported hardware on the official hardware compatibility list (HCL) of the vendor, but these are generally aimed at real server hardware and do not support/contain consumer hardware. So before buying hardware, check on forums to see what combinations of hardware are working for other people and choose the one that matches your desires best. You can also google for ESXi whitebox.

Furthermore, I plan to run many systems at the same time, hence the 32GB of memory and the 2 fast 512GB SSD disks. Besides the fast, but small SSD you generally also need more storage to store other files like by example operating system images and tools.

The next post is about the Hypervisor selection and installation.