My Home ESXi/vCenter, Hyper-V/SCVMM Lab Setup

I’m sharing my home lab setup for those who need help building an ESXi/vCenter, Hyper-V/SCVMM home lab.

Overview of the Lab

I built a home lab to play with stuff and build and break things. In addition to giving me an environment to practice, my home lab allows me to learn.

Moreover, since I write about technology, having a test environment at home provides me with an actual working infrastructure to show screenshots when I write how-to guides.

Finally, this lab is Windows/VMWare-focussed – the lab allows me to write about migrating VMware ESXi/vCenter VMs to Windows Hyper-V/SCVMM VMs.

Okay, enough of the intro, let’s get down to business!

The Lab Kits

The environment is made up of the following kits:

Computers and Monitors

External Storage

I also have 2x1TB External USB drives.

Ethernet Hub

I have 2 hubs. The first is my internet Wi-Fi hub.

I then connected another 5-port gub to one of the ports of the “main” hub to expand the number of ports.

Lab Configuration

In this section, I will specify what each computer does. I will also explain the network configuration – IPs, default gateways, and DNS – for all the computers.

ESXi Hosts

My VMware configuration is made of 2 ESXi hosts. I deployed a vCenter Appliance 8 server, then, created a vCenter cluster with the two ESXi hosts.

The table below details the VMware configuration for my two ESXi hosts.

vCenter, Datacenter, Cluster

ESXi Hosts/vCenter Datastores

Hyper-V Hosts

Hyper-V Cluster, VMMLibrary and VMM

*lab-vmm-lib is a clustered file server that serves as a Shared Library for SCVMM.

Hyper-V Storage

Storage Configuration

The two 1TB external USB drives are connected to the Dell Latitude E7470. Windows Server 2022 is installed on this laptop.

The laptop is used as a Windows Server iSCSI storage, delivering two iSCSI targets. The first iSCSI target is configured with one of the 1TB USB drives and is used as the storage for the ESXi hosts.

Meanwhile, the second 1TB USB drive is configured as an iSCSI target for the Hyper-V hosts. The target has three LUMs – 1GB for the Hyper-V cluster quorum witness.

The second iSCSI LUM is 200 GB and serves as the SCVMM Library. Whatever is left in the 1TB disk is then used for the third LUM and serves as the Hyper-V Clustered Shared Volume.

Configure the Hyper-V Storage

The table below details the specs described above. The configurations below are completed on the

For the Hyper-V hosts to access the iSCSI volumes, follow these steps:

1. From the first Hyper-V host, IPMpHPV4, use the iSCSI target to connect to the HypervStorage target. Once the host is connected, the 3 LUMs in the above table will become available in Disk Management
2. Then, from Windows Disk Management, configure the partitions as shown in this table,

The quorum and the VMM Library disks MUST be assigned a drive letter.

3. Finally, sign in to the second Hyper-V host, IPMpHPV5, and use the iSCSI initiator to connect to the HypervStorage iSCSI target. Once the 3 LUMs are available to the second host, you’re done – NO NEED to format the disks on the second host!

Configure the ESXi Datastore

To configure the ESXi hosts to access the ESXiDatastore iSCSI target, follow the steps in my guide – How to Assign an iSCSI Datastore to ESXi Hosts in vCenter – to access the iSCSI target and configure it as a datastore available to the two ESXi hosts.

Windows AD Domain

It is important to mention that, installing Service Center Virtual Machine Manager requires Active Directory. For my lab, my domain is called corp.itechguides.com.

I have a single Domain Controller Windows Domain. The DC is a VM I created on my Windows 11 PC which I use as a Hyper-V host.

As part of AD deployment, I configured the DC as a DNS server as well. So, for all configurations in my lab – vCenter, Hyper-V cluster, and SCVMM – I use this VM as my DNS server.

Finally, I configured my configured my AD domain as an identity source in vCenter. This allows me to sign in to vCenter with my Active Directory domain accounts instead of using the local vCenter accounts.

Conclusion

The home lab I described in this article includes a Hyper-V/SCVMM and an ESXi/vCenter configuration. With this setup, I’m able to play with both hypervisors.

In addition to playing with the individual hypervisors, I was able to test migrating VMware VMs to Hyper-V VMs.

I hope you were able to create your home lab using the information I provided in this hands-on guide. I would be extremely grateful if you could share your home lab setup with me and our readers.

To share your lab setup, use our “Leave a comment” form at the bottom of this page. Finally, before you run, kindly let me know what you think about this guide by responding to our “Was this page helpful?” feedback request below.