Part One
My initial design called for the following environment to be built up and tested on.
• 2 x ESXi servers
• 2 x SAN/NAS shared storage arrays (IX4-200d and OpenFiler)
• 1 x Active Directory Domain Controller (2008 R2)
• 1 x Hyper-V server (running the vCenter server)
• 1 x VMware vCenter server
Additionally I would also be working with various Microsoft and VMware technologies (including Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager and VMware View).
The environment is starting to look like this.
Obviously this is going to take up a fair amount of space, will be noisy and hot. So with the approval of my wife I turned a corner of my office into a server rack (courtesy of a racking system from B&Q).
My approach to this project was to utilise as much enterprise level hardware as possible but on a cheapish budget. With these considerations in mind I purchased the following hardware to use in the lab.
• 4 x Lenovo TS200 Servers (2xESXi with 16gb each, 1xHyper-V with 8gb and 1x spare)
• 1 x HP Microserver (running Openfiler)
• 1 x Iomega IX4-200d (2tb running iSCSI)
• 1 x Netgear GS724T Smart Switch
For the Windows Server 2008 R2 licences I am using my Technet Professional subscription, the OpenFiler install is free and as far as the vCenter Server and ESXi I’ll be using the 60 day evaluation licences.
10 GHz Total CPU 
16 GB Total RAM 
8,192 GB Total Disk
1 Host(s)
1 RPs
5 VMs
0 vMotions
(4) 
(1) 
(0)
2 Physical NICs
2 Virtual PGs
Colchester