Disclaimer
This blog will revolve around testing out hypervisors in a lab only setting using nested virtualization. The main goal of this blog is to document how to deploy nested hypervisors and play around with them for learning purposes or practice for certifications only. This blog does not provide official guidance, best practices, or any type of support. Use all content at your own risk, and if you use anything from this blog in production and cause an issue that is not my responsibility.
Additionally nothing in this blog comes with any form of support, liability, or responsibility from me. This blog will be exploring technologies in a non-standard, not supported, and lab only way. There are likely better ways to do things and many errors with how I have done them.
Lastly nothing in this blog is officially provided, vetted, or supported by the companies whose products I am learning about.
About This Blog
Having come from a VMware only background I want to learn more about non-VMware hypervisors. To do this I wanted to deploy small instances of various hypervisors to learn how they work, their concepts, and their terminology. Since I was already going through the work of building them all out I thought it would make sense to document how I did it in case other want to also learn by doing.
By using nested virtualization we can essentially create a digital twin of what would be a physical lab while using as little as a single physical server (a PowerEdge R740 in my case) to stand up multiple nested/virtual instances of VMware, OpenShift, Nutanix, Hyper-V, etc to perform functionality testing. This way we can learn the basics without needing a bunch of hardware, and in many cases do this learning in a home lab style environment. Some sections will use technologies you may only have in a true enterprise lab like when I am using external storage instead of HCI.
The plan for this blog right now it:
- Part 1: Base Lab Setup
- How I setup my R740 to be ready to nest multiple hypervisor clusters
- How to setup a basic AD/DNS/Windows workstation VM
- How to setup a basic Linux workstation VM
- How to deploy a nested vSphere 8 environment to be your “source” for V2V migrations later using official VMware code.
- Part 2: Plan, Deploy, and Explore a 3N Nutanix AHV HCI cluster
- Using the Nutanix Community Edition to create Nutanix clusters
- Part 3: Plan, Deploy, and Explore a 3N Nutanix AHV Cluster with External Storage
- Use official Nutanix code and an external storage array to create Nutanix clusters
- Part 4: Plan, Deploy, and Explore a 3N OpenShift Virtualization cluster
- Use official RedHat code and an external storage array to create Nutanix clusters
- Part 5: Plan, Deploy, and Explore a 2N Hyper-V cluster
- Part 6: Plan, Deploy, and Explore a 2N Proxmox cluster
- Part 7: Plan, Deploy, and Explore a 3N Canonical LXD/Microcloud cluster
- Part 8: Plan, Deploy, and Explore a 3N SUSE Virtualization cluster
I may add other hypervisors along the way, but for now that is plenty of work!