Mac

Portable Lab

mac

 

MacBook Pro – The uber portable lab in my humble view ☺ You can learn things like nested ESXi and in my previous roles I have had a whole environment test lab on an unsung hero: VMware Fusion.

Need business justification well how about this is an ideal training tool towards your certifications for VMWare, Hyper-V and Mac!

You are now probably in an uproar about argh thats only got 512GB SSD, That my friend is where Linked clone disks come in. They just save so much space and snapshots making it so easy to recover from scripting errors.  When I was building my imaging system I could cut down deployments to seconds rather than minutes.

If you did this for Windows I looked at the spec of a similar laptop in January. I searched out a  i7 512gb SSD 16gb ram and thin + Workstation but then its all Hackintosh + Cost of OS & EULA hell from Apple.  The best I could find from a major vendor was a HP Z Book £3400 vs £2100 for laptop and then cost of Fusion and copies of os included to deploy.

The only other I could fine was coming in at circa £1300 but not as big SSD or screen, I believe this was an Asus Zenbook which I know some people stay clear of but I see no issue with it.

Also if you want to save a pretty penny of two go check out VMUG Advantage with this you even get access to Vcenter as part of the EvalExperience for 365 days! If you want to refer LonVMUG or SWVMUG that would be great 🙂

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