Set up low cost VMware server

Physical VMware server running free VMweare ESXi 6.0, great for home lab or development:
http://www.quadix.co/ (Yet, many other alternatives available)
 
VMware ESXi 6.0:
https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/evalcenter?p=free-esxi6

Benchmark results:
http://serverbear.com/benchmark/2014/11/16/ngHKZHkbCQ88wG2E

DNS:
http://aws.amazon.com/route53/

High availability:
https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san - Storage replication 

Rough pseudo code:

Before failure generate list of all VMs:

vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms > /san/VMlist

On failover node run this script:

#!/bin/bash

pingresult=`ping -c $num_pings -W $ping_timeout $esx_ip | grep time= | wc -l`

while [ "$pingresult" != "0" ]

do

       echo `date` "-- ping result = $pingresult out of $num_pings"

       sleep $wait_between_pings

       pingresult=`ping -c $num_pings -W $ping_timeout $esx_ip | grep time= | wc -l`

done

for i in `cat /san/VMlist` 

do
      gather DATASTORE and NAME from $i

      MYVM=`vim-cmd solo/registervm /vmfs/volumes/{DATASTORE}/${NAME}/${NAME}.vmx`

      vim-cmd vmsvc/power.on $MYVM

fi

Backup:
a) Veeam Free
b) aws s3 sync . s3://mybucket
c) ec2-import-instance
d) Azure site recovery
e) Mount S3 / Google Drive on Linux
f) Bitbucket
g) Github

Monitoring:
https://www.veeam.com/virtual-server-management-one-free.html
http://www.solarwinds.com/products/freetools/vm_monitor.aspx
https://www.opsview.com/products/opsview-atom

ESXi Management Appliance (MA):
https://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vima/

Logging/Analytics:
https://www.sumologic.com/pricing/
https://www.sumologic.com/application/vmware-log-analyzer-speed-scale-anomaly-detection/

Creating vSphere VM’s using Ansible:
http://everythingshouldbevirtual.com/creating-vsphere-vms-using-ansible
http://docs.ansible.com/vsphere_guest_module.html

VPN Appliance:
https://openvpn.net/index.php/access-server/download-openvpn-as-vm.html
http://blog.ls20.com/ipsec-l2tp-vpn-auto-setup-for-ubuntu-12-04-on-amazon-ec2/

Free Firewall:
https://www.pfsense.org/ (FreeBSD based)
https://opnsense.org/ (Fork of PFsense)
http://www.ipfire.org/
http://www.untangle.com/
https://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/free-tools.aspx (Sophos UTM Home Edition)

Centos 7 NAT VM:
https://devops.profitbricks.com/tutorials/deploy-outbound-nat-gateway-on-centos-7/

Nested ESXi 6.0:
http://www.vladan.fr/nested-esxi-6-in-a-lab/

NAS (NFS storage for nested ESXi above):
http://www.openmediavault.org/
http://www.freenas.org/

Free VMware tools:
http://blog.zorangagic.com/2015/03/free-vmware-tools.html