While most things these days are living in the cloud and cloud adoption is at an all time high, we still currently have most things living in our own datacenter running on VMware. So there is still a case to be made that home labs still have a place and a purpose when trying to test out new things in that space. With that being said, my current lab equipment has a few years on it, so while I’ve read posts online that say this does work, how well and effective it works remains to be seen.

“Do or do not. There is no try” -Yoda

While I try to follow Yoda’s teachings as much as possible, I am going to attempt to reuse some equipment that has been around a few years and see how far I can get with it. The hardware are three Intel NUC 8th generation machines with 32GB of RAM each. They are all using a USB attached drive to boot from since ESXi still can’t see the MicroSD card slot present on the machine.

The plan is to install the latest version of ESXi 8 along with a Vcenter server of the same version. I have a MacBook Pro as well as a Windows 11 home desktop that can be used to do the deployment of the Vcenter server. I’ll update future blog posts of my progress and experience but will be pulling helpful info from others out there from their previous experiences. More to come so stay tuned.