This Free E-book describes the setup of Portable Lab to run nested ESXi 5.1 servers with nested VMs, shared storage, virtual networking etc... This is no mean to be a perfect, without errors, guide. But it’s a guide which is available for Free, as is. And it is a detailed, step-by-step guide. There aren’t many around. I’ll try to update this e-book as the products will evolve.

Almost everyone has one powerful machine, PC, at home to work with, but not everyone can afford to buy 2 whiteboxes or small servers PLUS a NAS box which does shared hosting. And then you still need 4th box to access all this.

You can see an XP virtual machine being protected by Fault Tolerance. This VM is running “inside” of a virtualized (nested) ESXi 5.1 host. You’ll be able to test vMotion and High Availability as well. Those are the enterprise class features of VMware vSphere.