I have read a few other discussions that have asked about building their own lab, but very few offer advice on storage. I am taking a community class to prep for the VCP 5.1 and the lab availability at school sxcks. Thought about desiging my own lab so that i can spend weekends doing the labs and plan to take the VCP 5.1 in early December. Have been told by a few that have taken the exam to lab lab lab!
I bought a computer case with 4 120mm fans, a 750w P/S, a MSI MB that supports 32g of ram and a 8 core AMD. Also, I plan to install Windows 2008 or 2012 with raid1 (2) western digital 500g drives and Vcenter server/client acting as the management server. No linux, trying to copy school enviroment. I also have 2 WD 1.5g HD's for storage.
The biggest problem would be the storage configuration. Can I use the 1.5g's (SATA) as storage? I know enough that I can load the Vcenter server/client on the windows OS, but can I install the ESXI on the 1.5g's? Would they need to be physical or virtual or do I have a choice? Is this a problem in regards to NFS? How slow will the storage ESXI drives be given that they are SATA?
I only have access to the lab on Tuesday nights so one can forget what was accomplish a whole week later and I don't expect reading the book will/should be the only source of study material.
Any help wouild be appreciated.