In starting to build out my home lab to have all the bells and whistles, I wanted to move from a 2 stand alone ESXi hosts (running on NUC’s) to be more “Enterprise” and running it on the full VMware stack.
The VMware User Group has a membership that comes with all the VMware licenses for only US$200 Per year. My employer was kind enough to allow me to expense this, as I am also using my lab to do customer demos, and Proof Of Concepts as well.
I am still using the WatchGuard Firebox as my main firewall, but I am going to move to the Unifi UDM or UDR, I haven’t decided which one yet. All of my switches are already Unifi switches, and I have 1 unifi AP. I am also running a cloud controller on the PiHole VM. I also still have a few WatchGuard AP’s but they have proven to be not as stable as I would have liked, and I am really looking forward to have all the network managed in 1 interface. Currently there are 3 interface that I need to sue to make changes to the network (think VLANS, etc…). I have the WatchGuard web interface for the main firewall, the WatchGuard Cloud interface to manage the AP’s, and the Unifi cloud key to manage the switches and single AP.
Below is a high level of how it looks at the moment, but there are a lot more VM’s on those Virtual Servers. In the next post I will go into details on models and Specs.
