The other day I was installing a VSAN 6 Proof of Concept in the lab and needed a disk to appear as an SSD. There are two ways to do this, each with their own merits, although only one can be used if you plan on using nested ESXi on vCloud Air. Continue reading
Nested ESXi
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
Building an advanced lab using VMware vRealize Automation – Part 2: Physical infrastructure – storage
In part 1 I outlined the aims of the project, which is to build an advanced lab using VMware vRealize Automation. In this article, we will configure the storage that will house our provisioned virtual machines.
The first constraint that has been identified is cost, which effectively rules out fibre channel storage of any kind. However, with the right hardware, we can utilise other technologies such as iSCSI and still provision high-performance storage: Continue reading
Building an advanced lab using VMware vRealize Automation – Part 1: Intro
A few months back my boss came to me and asked if I could build a test lab for the company. Being a managed services company with a number of technical staff, it was important to give them a training ground where skills can be learned but mistakes also made without consequence.
We have a lot of kit we currently use for testing changes on prior to putting them live, but not a segregated area dedicated for this purpose. Continue reading
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