Last year at VMworld in San Francisco I bought two Emulex OCe10102 10GbE cards for my home lab, and used two Dell/Force10 cables to connect them together. One card went into my Dell PowerEdge T710, and one in my HP Microserver Gen7. Continue reading
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Building an advanced lab using VMware vRealize Automation – Part 11: Configure endpoint & fabric/business groups
In part 10 we configured the vRealize Automation default tenant for our lab. We decided against using multiple tenants as the lab is only hosting one organization, and business groups utilizing it will be defined using other means.
In this part, we configure the blueprints which will make up our service catalog. Continue reading
Building an advanced lab using VMware vRealize Automation – Part 10: Configure tenants
In part 9 we installed and configured the IaaS platform for our lab.
In this part we discuss tenants. We configure the default tenant, and explain why you might need more than one. Continue reading
Building an advanced lab using VMware vRealize Automation – Part 9: Deploy and configure the IaaS platform
In part 8 we installed and configured the vRealize Automation Appliance into the lab.
In this part we deploy and configure the IaaS platform. This will involve building a Windows Server VM and installing the requisite components. Once done, we will secure the platform with an SSL certificate from our Certificate Authority. Continue reading
Building an advanced lab using VMware vRealize Automation – Part 8: Deploy and configure the vRA Appliance
In part 7 we configured SSL certificates for our newly deployed vCenter Server Appliance. In this part, we deploy the vRealize Automation Appliance into the lab.
After deployment we will perform a number of tasks to enable the appliance to work in the lab environment.
Continue reading
Building an advanced lab using VMware vRealize Automation – Part 7: Configure vCenter Server Appliance SSL certificates
In part 6 we installed and configured a vCenter Server Appliance in the lab. This will manage the various components, plus serve as an endpoint for vRealize Automation.
In this post we replace the default SSL certificates from the vCSA with trusted certificates from our in-house certificate authority. Continue reading
Building an advanced lab using VMware vRealize Automation – Part 6: Deploy and configure the vCenter Server Appliance
In part 5 of this series we created a Windows 2012 R2 Domain Controller to provide our authentication services for the environment.
In this part, we deploy the VMware vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) 5.5. This will serve as the backbone to our infrastructure, as well as the endpoint for the majority of our VMware vRealize Automation deployments. Later in the series, we will configure other endpoints such as VMware’s vCloud Air or AWS. Continue reading
Building an advanced lab using VMware vRealize Automation – Part 5: Authentication services
In part 4 of this series we configured two ESXi hosts to host our lab. In this part we will setup a Windows Server 2012 R2 Core virtual machine and configure it as a domain controller in a separate root domain. We will then configure a forest trust to our production domain so that our users can authenticate. Continue reading
Building an advanced lab using VMware vRealize Automation – Part 4: Physical infrastructure – compute
In part 3 of this series on building a lab using VMware vRealize Automation we configured the physical networking to support our lab. In this part we install and configure VMware vSphere 5.5 on our servers.
Before we can install vSphere, we have to analyse our requirements and source hardware to satisfy them. Obviously we would like hardware that comes with as much compute, storage and network capacity as possible, but budgetary constraints must be taken into consideration. Continue reading
Building an advanced lab using VMware vRealize Automation – Part 3: Physical infrastructure – networking
In part 2 we outlined our storage resources for the project. We built a Windows 2012 R2 Server which provided iSCSI and NFS services to the environment.
In this part we configure the networking infrastructure that has been provided for the lab, and prepare it for the introduction of our VMware ESXi hosts. Continue reading
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