

VyOS router software (I used the latest rolling release – download it here).vSphere 6.7 or later (the free vSphere Hypervisor version should be fine).The three pieces of software you’ll need are: Each of these vSwitches will have a single port group, as before, named to match the network segment it will use.įinally, I’ll be using an open source router from VyOS to connect these network segments together, relay DHCP requests, and ensure DNS resolution works for both local systems and for services on the web. So why 2 vSwitches? Well, quite often I’m trying to simulate environments where systems are replicating data between data centers and I want to test such things as site failover. that the other test VMs may need.Ģ more isolated vSwitches will then be needed for installing my test systems. This is mainly for supplying services such as DHCP, DNS, file storage, etc. This port group will be for any utility VMs that I may wish to build, such as the Windows Domain Controller shown in the diagram. without direct uplink) vSwitch with a single port group called “10.0.1.0/24”. Then I will create a second isolated (i.e. This vSwitch will also have a vmkernel port for host management. I like to name my portgroups after the network segment that they will use, so this one will be called “192.168.1.0/24” to match the IP range used on my home network. The NIC is configured as an uplink to the first vSwitch which will have a single port group for VM connectivity. The server is attached via a single 1Gb NIC to my home network which has access to the internet via my ISP router. Here’s how I built my lab using vSphere virtual switches and an open source router package called VyOS.įirst of all, here’s an outline of what I’m trying to achieve. After much trial and error I decided I needed to build a virtual environment with multiple routed network segments that I could reuse whenever I needed depending on the technology I wanted to test.

I was very lucky to acquire this system as it has 16 CPU cores, 48GB of RAM and some decent hard drives giving me approximately 3TB to play with. With that in mind, I run a home lab based on Dell PowerEdge T430 server. As part of my role as technical sales specialist, I like to build labs to learn and experiment with different products, be they from VMware, Veeam, Nutanix, NetApp or any other vendor that I’m asked to work with.
