There are many options when it comes to building and running your own vSphere home lab. There are going to be different pros and cons to each of these solutions which you will need to evaluate things like cost, performance, maintenance, ease of use and complexity to name a few. Below is a list of the currently available options to you today.
Nested Virtualization Resources
Here is a consolidated page on all the articles that I have written about the Nested Virtualizatoin (nested ESXi, Hyper-V, etc) and all the goodies that are "Not Supported".
vSphere / vCloud 5.1
- Having Difficulties Enabling Nested ESXi in vSphere 5.1?
- How to Enable Nested ESXi & Other Hypervisors in vSphere 5.1
- How to Enable Nested ESXi & Other Hypervisors in vCloud Director 5.1
vSphere / vCloud 5.0
- How to Enable Support for Nested 64bit & Hyper-V VMs in vSphere 5
- The Missing Piece In Creating Your Own Ghetto vSEL Cloud
Additional Info/Tips/Tricks/
- Nested ESXi 5.1 Supports VMXNET3 Network Adapter Type
- How to Configure Nested ESXi 5 to Support EVC Clusters
- How to Enable Nested vFT (virtual Fault Tolerance) in vSphere 5
- How to Install VMware VSA in Nested ESXi 5 Host Using the GUI
- Cool Undocumented Features in vCloud Director 1.5
- The Missing Piece In Creating Your Own Ghetto vSEL Cloud
- Nested Virtualization APIs For vSphere & vCloud Director 5.1
- How To Enable Nested ESXi Using VXLAN In vSphere & vCloud Director
- Will Intel’s VMCS Shadowing Feature Benefit VMware’s Nested Virtualization?
- How to run Nested RHEV Hypervisor on ESXi?
- How to quickly setup and test VMware VSAN (Virtual SAN) using Nested ESXi
- How to run Nested ESXi on top of a VSAN datastore?
- VMware Tools for Nested ESXi
- Why is Promiscuous Mode & Forged Transmits required for Nested ESXi?
- How to properly clone a Nested ESXi VM?