lots of home lab use KVM, almost entirely because of price.
Sure, it doesn't let you play with VMware's latest toys, but it's free and does what you need it to do for a home lab.
VMware has kicked off a new program that looks like it will make it easier to build home labs. Mostly. The new EVALExperienence program is pretty simple: cough up the US$200 required to become a member of the VMware user group (VMUG) Advantage program and you'll find yourself able to download and run vCenter Server, vSphere …
Sure, it doesn't let you play with VMware's latest toys, but it's free and does what you need it to do for a home lab.
No, it does what you need a home lab to do - there are a whole host of reasons and different requirements. Any form of virtualisation would have been fairly useless when going for my CCNA/CCNP a few years back. However, a program such as this is clearly aimed at people wanting to play with VMware specifically, not simply as a precursor to setting up something else.
"I know KVM/Xen/whatever" has only limited traction when the description for that job you are going for discusses VMware specifically as the first item in the list of requirements.
Correction: idiot managers put guns to the heads of sysadmins and threaten to splatter their brains all over the wall unless they use Hyper-V. Because there is no universe in which rational people would choose to use the steaming fuckpile of horrors that is System Center Virtual Machine Manager.
Now, Hyper-V manager on it's own is decent. ISH, even if ESXi's C# client still beats it silly. But for actually running a production environment? Hell no!
At least KVM is so bad that anyone selling KVM virty solutions seriously (like Scale Computing) has to come up with a UI that doesn't suck...and they usually do. Hyper-V just has the soul-evaporating horror that is System Center...and the horror that is the new "Azure portal" will soon be the new alternative! And if you've seen that, you've probably already started self-harming because you can't unsee what was seen!
Surely this 2cpu license lets you run a nested lab with a tiny vsan by running 3 vsan hosts as guests on a single 2 CPU vmware host?
Not enough to do anything more real world than poke it - certainly limiting the capacity to run your own AD, Exchange etc on older servers.
I would be interested in a proper write up of a home lab running a £200 vsan that could be legally used for home learning - as an alternative to the way some people do it with keygenz and serialz.
Wait.... have I missed something here?
Virtual SAN requires a minimum of 3 hosts (plus 1x SSD + some HDD), there's a memory requirement (6GB) but I don't remember there being a requirement for CPU......
So what's stopping you from running it on 3 hosts with just 1 CPU??
(which means 3 licenses required)