Are you looking to get started with VMware and create your own home lab? One of the best ways to save money is to purchase a VMUG membership, which offers discounts on products and services. You can also get discounted licenses for your lab. Learn more about how to get the most out of your subscription and use it to set up a home lab.

Lot's of us running a vSphere Lab at home have to be mindful of the electrical costs associated with using physical servers. In my case, I have three (3) Dell R620's, one FreeNAS server, and two Cisco switches. Electrical costs are always on my mind, especially now that I work from home and use more electricity. 

One of the major benefits of working with VMs is that you can easily take a snapshot, make a change, test out your change or changes, and if something goes horribly wrong, you can easily revert back your changes at a click of a button. Backup software also uses snapshots.

 As a System Administrator or System Engineer, one of the most frequent requests you'll receive is to expand the disk size on virtual Windows Servers and Windows Desktops. Most of the time, it's straightforward: 1) make sure you have enough space on the SAN, 2)

VMware regularly releases updates to its Powershell module, known as PowerCLI. While in the past you had to go to the vmware.com website, download the executable - by the way, you still can for older versions - and install PowerCLI, you no longer have to since there's an easier way directly from a PowerShell console.

VMware documentation is excellent, but not if you're a beginner with PowerCLI. While you will find documentation on how to configure SNMP for your ESXi hosts, the way it's presented is not very clear and will leave you scratching your head in confusion since you'll be thinking how does this configure SNMP on all my ESXi hosts?

Microsoft has, for a long time, provided tools called Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) to do remote administration of servers and desktops. These tools are handy if you are regularly having to look at configurations or make changes for machines joined to a Microsoft Windows Domain. Unfortunately, installing these tools is not always that easy since Microsoft changes the install method with each version of Microsoft Windows.

You've upgraded to the latest version of vCenter Server, ESXi, VMware Tools, and either scheduled the VM Hardware upgrade on the next reboot or you've manually upgraded the hardware version for each machine. Everything has gone according to plan with no issues during the scheduled maintenance. However, after everything has been done, you find that one of your 3rd party solutions no longer works and you find yourself staring at a list of errors.