but, assuming you are learning the vmware stack because of employment. Not knowing things like vsan, ISCSI and vmotion makes your lab nearly worthless.
Learning vsphere and esxi properly requires atleast a decently sized cluster, especially if you start throwing NSX in the mix.
Forget even iSCSI as the goalpost, a lot of places still use fibrechannel drives and controllers and FCoE makes sense mostly once you’ve hit at least 10 GbE which is a bit pricey for the sake of learning while it’s basically hot garbage in professional environments worth a career in. Half the point of vSphere in a professional capacity requires use of several nodes such as different HA options, how to trunk networks, distinctions between different LUN abstractions (RDMs in physical v virtual compatibility modes) and an endless parade of the ways different vendors’ SANs and physical switches can completely mess up and ruin your entire month if you’re not pedantic about every random switch or flag in configuration. All these other vendor minutiae being so important rather than the general concepts as a practitioner is part of why I don’t do VMware professionally anymore and went quietly to SRE janitoring in major cloud providers and chalked those days up as time in IT. It’s just much more practical to learn AWS than to pore over the Cisco Nexus documentation unless one’s career really is in the lower infrastructure levels of tech.
Learning vsphere and esxi properly requires atleast a decently sized cluster, especially if you start throwing NSX in the mix.