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They have served as the underlying hardware infrastructure for my now vSphere 7 U1 home lab. All of the Supermicro servers I have running in the lab have been ultra-stable and problem-free so far and have gained my trust over the years of using them. However, I run Supermicro servers in the home lab as I have found these to have the same enterprise feel without breaking the bank on hardware. To begin with, how do you run VMware Horizon? I have written about my home lab hardware in numerous articles. It allows easily accessing the environment from not only a Windows device but all my other mobile devices as well with the mobile VMware Horizon client. I highly prefer using VMware Horizon to access my home lab network as opposed to VPN connection. It is cool to create your own VMware Horizon home lab to understand how the pieces and parts work together to form the overall solution, which certainly helps design a real-world production solution.Īlso, while I mentioned above that it is overkill for remote access, it really isn’t that much infrastructure when you boil it down to the necessities that you need. It relies on every layer from networking, to the storage, to vSphere cluster health, all the way down to the end-user desktop. You really have to know from “soup to nuts” how the underlying infrastructure works to troubleshoot VMware Horizon successfully. VMware Horizon arguably is one of the technologies that touch every layer of the stack. Additionally, once you learn to troubleshoot the various issues in your VMware Horizon home lab, you will be well-versed in tackling many of the same problems in a true production environment, albeit at a larger scale.
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However, like any home lab endeavor, building it is part of the hands-on learning experience. You may wonder, why would I have the need or the desire to build out a VMware Horizon home lab as this is obviously overkill for remote access to your home network. I wanted to detail the basics of what you will need for a VMware Horizon home lab build that will allow you to get familiar with the architecture and how the solution works, even with a residential Internet connection ingress traffic. However, with this year being called many titles, including “the year of remote work” and “the year of VDI,” are you running a VMware Horizon home lab? If not, this post is for you. You may have NSX-T running in your lab as well. Many of you already have a VMware vSphere home lab where you are running the latest and greatest vSphere version, including vCenter Server, ESXi hosts, and maybe a vSAN cluster.
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