Totally agree about a more flexible solution regarding lab; I generally use DC/OS in a dockerized context on a single VM or on an instance in a cloud account; mesos or yarn are great solution all included, it's very easy to install a complete big data test environment and learn the basics in a small docker context, or in a vagrant sandbox; VMware solutions should be more focused on a single virtual machine containing the whole testing framework in containers, since we're not working on performance but better on experimenting technologies.
Totally agree about a more flexible solution regarding lab; I generally use DC/OS in a dockerized context on a single VM or on an instance in a cloud account; mesos or yarn are great solution all included, it's very easy to install a complete big data test environment and learn the basics in a small docker context, or in a vagrant sandbox; VMware solutions should be more focused on a single virtual machine containing the whole testing framework in containers, since we're not working on performance but better on experimenting technologies.