Jim Millard is currently a Sr SE for VMware, and has been in the industry since 1992. He built the beginnings of a home lab in 1998 with a pair of modems and a desktop PC running NetWare 5 that could demand-dial and bond multiple POTS lines for better Internet access. A decade later—and many years of struggling with physical servers in his home environment—he cobbled together a couple of Dell 2850 surplus servers with a PX6-300d NAS box and had his first vSphere lab. Jumping from the customer to the VAR space as a deployment engineer, Jim used his lab to practical ends and achieved numerous industry certifications. With slow growth and gradual alterations, Jim's lab is now equivalent to many small business implementations, and allows him to demonstrate almost all the on-premises capabilities that VMware offers.
HP: http://blog.millard.org/