Homelab Question

[mmcgurty]

I was able to purchase an 1U HP Proliant DL360 G5 with the following specs below for $200 from a co-worker that was moving and didn't want to take his hardware with him across the country.

2xQuad-Core Intel Xeon 2.33GHz/1333MHz (2x4MB L2) (E5345 - Clovertown?)
20GB ECC PC2-5300MHz (4x4GB and 4x1GB configuration)
6x2.5" 146GB SAS 10K drives on P400i Controller with 256MB cache (RAID 0/1/1+0/5/6) + 2 spare drives of the same type.
An additional 4x2.5" 36GB SAS 10K drives.
2x700W power supplies

I would like to run VMware on it and spin up a few linux instances for things like Observium or NAGIOS, Splunk, Cisco CSR/1000V, F5 LTM Virtual, etc against my home devices.  Does anyone know how it works to get licenses for things like this?  Do they offer like a homelab license or are folks just getting additional licenses from their work and running them at home (which it seems is against terms and conditions)?  I really don't want to reinstall the hypervisor every 30 days if I don't have to.

[deanwebb]

I know Cisco does not offer homelab licenses. If you can get a demo license without having to go through a sales guy, good for you. Otherwise, every 30 days, you'll need to do the needful.

[SimonV]

The basic version of vSphere is free once u register an account. I'm running on 6.0 and the whole process was simple. For most of the VM appliances, you can get free or trial licenses. In this thread you'll find a link to Ethan Banks' blog with some free/trial virtual appliances from Cisco/Juniper/F5/HP....

[Nerm]

Both Microsoft Hyper-V and Vmware Vsphere hypervisors are free.

[that1guy15]

Build the VM and snapshot it or convert it to template. Once the license expires backup and revert to the snapshot or delete and rebuild from template.

Most demos or lab devices now days dont have expiration but limit you in some way or another such as number of connections or throughput.