NSX

NSX Home Lab Series – 1. The Hardware

A VMware NSX home lab is a powerful tool for learning and mastering the VMware NSX platform. By setting up and experimenting with a simulated environment, you can gain hands-on experience with the product and develop the skills needed to design, deploy, and manage virtual networks in a production environment.


I put my first NSX home lab together over seven years ago when I was new to virtualization. Now it’s time to repeat the process in a series of knowledge-sharing articles.


I can’t think of anyone more qualified to help on the hardware side than Mike from the awesome vswitchzero YouTube channel. Mike has been creating engaging retro computer hardware content that I enjoy. If you’re not following him, I highly recommend you check him out.

Mike was able to source me this Dell Precision 5810 Media Workstation Desktop. Isn’t the Run VMware NSX sticker a nice touch?

It is the 14 core Intel Xeon processor version:

  • Precision Tower 5810
  • 14 CPUs x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2660 v4 @ 2.00GHz
    • 128GB of RAM
    • 240GB SSD
    • 1 TB SSD
    • Quad port Intel i340-T4 network adapter
    • ESXi8.0.0

With a few test VMs in place, it looks like this:

A NSX environment needs a design, which will be the focus of the next article.

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