The Hardware Behind the Book

Starting out, it can seem difficult to build an environment in which you can learn by implementing the exercises and practices detailed in this book. It is possible to build a practice lab with minimal hardware, and we encourage you to follow along with the book. If you're just starting, we recommend that you build a nested virtual lab on your laptop or desktop computer. A nested lab runs the hypervisor itself, ESXi, as a virtual machine. It needs VMware Workstation or Fusion installed and at least 16 GB of RAM. Be sure to read Chapters 2 and 3 before you attempt to construct any type of environment for development purposes.

For the purpose of writing this book, we used multiple hardware configurations. When travelling, it was simple to spin up a simple nested lab on our laptops, but more often than not, we used a decent setup with a small number of servers and storage.

It's not impossible to set yourself up with a nice lab to follow along. But for...