Lab-V, nesting Hyper-V creating your own lab

UPDATE

This post will be updated any day now.

This was the first post I made and it’s also the most popular one. Stay tuned for the update.

/UPDATE

Setting up a Hyper-V and System Center lab of your own is expensive but there are some solutions. My initial approach was to use VMware Workstation 8. Why because I possess a license 🙂 (You get one for free when you pass the VCP exam.) but the juice needed for firing up all VMs made me reconsider. It works if you just labbing with a few VMs but if you fire up two hyper-V VMs which holds a lot of Hyper-V VMs it get painful.

First you need a pretty descent server, I got my hands on a HP DL 380 G5 with 2 Quad Core Processors which I packed with RAM (managed to get 32 GB) and all the discs I could get my hands on.

Then I installed VMware vSphere 5, yes I know what some of  you are thinking. But I have used nesting of hypervisors before (with running VMs inside) when I studied for the VCP exams. Servers and SAN is to expensive for me to get my hands on just for studying purposes. And I really wish I could do that in Hyper-V also. that is #1 on my wish list.

When I studied for the MCITP Virtualization Administrator  http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/cert-virtualization.aspx I cursed the fact that I wasn’t able to get it working properly and I was stuck with just some used PC:s (and headache). Anyhow just around the release of vSphere 5 i found my salvation 🙂
I found a blog post describing just what I needed at virtuallyGetto http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2011/07/how-to-enable-support-for-nested-64bit.html and http://www.vcritical.com/2011/07/vmware-vsphere-can-virtualize-itself/

When vSphere is installed the configurations mentioned in both blogs will help you out

Regarding the storage: I use NetApp Data ONTAP Simulator https://communities.netapp.com/docs/DOC-1034

Hans Vredevoort has made an excellent article describing how install and to connect SCVMM 2012 to the installation: Installation of Data ONTAP Simulator in a Hyper-V guest (CentOS) and using an SMI-S provider to connect to SCVMM 2012

Project Frankenvisor at NetApp Community gives us some nice functions also
https://communities.netapp.com/community/netapp-blogs/msenviro/blog/2011/10/28/project-frankenvisor-virtualizing-hyper-v-on-vmware-vsphere

Thats it and thats that 🙂