The current practice for anyone who needs a mobile lab for their VMware virtual lab configurations is to use solid state disks (SSDs). The trick is to set up a tier of storage, even if it’s on a laptop. This is ideally suited for laptops that have multiple drive bays. The primary drive would be where the operating system would run (presumably Windows or Mac OS X), and the secondary drive would be where the virtual machines would live. In the case of ESXi, the virtualized host only consumes a few GB of disk space.
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