For a few months now I’ve been limping along with my old laptop and more recently I took delivery of a new system plus a 240GB OSZ SSD drive. I picked some serios spec to help me run as other do in the Veeam Teeam a mobile lab with VMware Workstation. Since I purchased system hardware last things have moved on a tad. My new laptop (if you can call it that) is a:

Dell M4500

16GB or RAM

Core i7 8 x logical CPUs (Quad core with HyperThreading)

240GB OSZ SSD drive

So the first thing I wanted to test is a nested version of ESXi as the whole point of a mobile lab is to run a virtual infrastructure. Previously it was possible on my old system (dual core, 8GB ram, SATA) but it ran like a dog, and painful to boot up. In fact for demo purposes we would have all the VMs on standby otherwise it meant waiting an extra 30 minutes for boot up.

First thing I did was haggle with Dell for a while to get the price down to nearly 50% of the RRP. After my hardware arrived I had a bit of fun cloning the preinstalled SATA disk to my new SSD drive.

Next I got VMware Workstation installed and then created a ESX VM.

Now the first thing I noticed was the install time for ESXi nested in a VMware workstation VM was ridiculasly fast.

The next thing I noticed was to boot up time was stupid fast. In fact it boots faster than my physical lab servers running ESXi

My advice to you is bend you bosses arm and purchase the above hardware.. VAVA..VAVOOOM

My next purchase is a modular harddrive bay to put the SATA disk back in the system as a second drive.