In the past, I attempted to get VMware up and running using my PC tower.
While I was successful, I was limited to ESXi 6.7 and chose not to go too far to avoid risking my primary hard drives.
Fast forward to today—thanks to a good friend who sent me a rack-mounted server to experiment with—I was able to successfully deploy VMware ESXi 8.0, load virtual machines, and get it fully operational.
Current Server Hardware:
CPU: Intel® Xeon® E-2336 @ 2.90GHz (6 cores / 12 logical processors)
Memory: 32GB RAM
Storage:
4TB
4TB
894GB
319GB
I wanted to approach this the right way after my interview with Orion Financial. When I received this server, I seriously considered installing Proxmox, but ultimately decided to move forward with VMware to gain a deeper understanding of how this hypervisor operates.
During my time there, I gained hands-on experience with VMware in an enterprise environment, allowing me to observe its inner workings. I’m now applying that real-world experience by building and configuring my own environment in the lab.
Current Virtual Machines:
Windows Server 2022
Windows 11 Pro
Key Takeaways So Far:
Windows 11 is resource-intensive — even with 16GB of RAM allocated, it has maxed out on several occasions.
Windows Server is significantly more efficient, requiring far less memory to operate smoothly.
I’m currently working on creating a macOS VM, which has proven to require more tuning and configuration than Windows or Linux virtual machines.
Looking ahead, I plan to deploy several Linux VMs to run dedicated services from home and potentially build a dedicated backup server for my Proxmox virtual machines and containers.
Hands-on labs like this continue to reinforce my interest in infrastructure, virtualization, and enterprise environments. Always learning and building.