VMware Community Homelabs Project

On a weekly basis, I easily get at least half a dozen inquires ranging from our customers, partners and even internal VMware employees on the topic of VMware Homelabs. The most common requests I receive is whether hardware X will work and whether I have tried it to recommended known build-of-materials (BOM). Funny enough, just last week I was asked to review our CTO's (Greg Lavender) BOM as he was also interested in building his own personal VMware homelab which goes to show just how popular this topic really is 😊

Although I have written a TON of content regarding VMware Homelabs, I definitely can not cover every single permutation. Having seen so many awesome VMware Homelabs over the years from the VMware Community, why not leverage the power of our community to crowdsource all the different homelab configurations into a single location which can then be shared with the rest of the community? This idea was kicked off about two weeks ago and I have put together a simple Google Form which you can find the link below to submit your information.

Submit VMware Community Homelab: https://www.williamlam.com/homelab

As of writing this blog post today, I have received a total of 48 valid submissions (there were a handful that had invalid URLs and/or did not follow directions and published a publicly accessible URL to their homelab BOM which I had to remove from the submission). The submissions have been pretty interesting to see and just how different each homelab is, especially from a cost perspective ranging from $800 up to $150,000 🤯At that price, this is a full blown datacenter and I am sure folks have an ideas on who owns those labs (hint, its not me 😉). I want to thank everyone who has submitted to the project and help get the word out, hopefully we will see even more submissions in 2020! The results have been pretty interesting and it is great to see how different each homelab is, especially on the price 

For now, you can view the complete results in the short URL below and periodically I will process any additional submissions and publish them to the Github repo.

VMware Community Homelab Results: http://vmwa.re/homelab