It's vSphere Beta Time

vSphere Beta Program Overview

VMware has announce the upcoming VMware vSphere Beta Program. This program enables participants to help define the direction of the most widely adopted industry-leading virtualization platform. 

Folks who want to participate in the program can now indicate their interest by filling out this simple vSphere Beta Application form.

The vSphere team will grant access to the program to selected candidates in stages. This vSphere Beta Program leverages a private Beta community to download software and share information. 

You can expect to download, install, and test vSphere Beta software in your environment or get invited to try new features in a VMware hosted environment. 

Reasons to participate in beta opportunity:

Receive early access to the vSphere Beta products

Interact with the vSphere Beta team consisting of Product Managers, Engineers, Technical Support, and Technical Writers.

Provide direct input on product functionality, configurability, usability, and performance.

Provide feedback influencing future products, training, documentation, and services.

Collaborate with other participants, learn about their use cases, and share advice and learnings.

Action Required

Online acceptance of the Master Software Beta Test Agreement will be required prior to visiting the Private Beta Community.

Install beta software within 3 days of receiving access to the beta product.

Provide feedback within the first 4 weeks of the beta program.

Submit Support Requests for bugs, issues and feature requests.

Complete surveys and beta test assignments.

Participate in the private beta discussion forum and conference calls.

Back To Basics - Home Lab Part 5

In Our Last Blog Post of Home Lab Series we have already gone through the environment we are working on Part 1 and also seen the installation of DC in Part 2, Esxi in Part 3 and Open filer in Part 4.

Will Finally Proceed with the installation of our last Virtual Machine which we required.

Create Another Virtual Machine for vCenter Server

Now will proceed further with the installation of vCenter Server, i have installed vCenter server on windows server 2008 R2, you can also install vCenter as an appliance, don't forget to have a look on installation prerequisites.

Back to Basics - Home Lab Part 4

In Our Last Blog Post of Home Lab Series we have already gone through the environment we are working on Part 1 and also seen the installation of DC in Part 2 and Esxi in Part 3.

It's Time to Proceed further with the Step By Step Installation and Configuration of Open filler another VM we need for our Home Lab.

Most of the activities we will be performing post our infrastructure is ready needs shared storage, so i created a VM and allocated few CPU and Memory resources and good amount of disk size and mounted Openfiler ISO on Virtual machine.

Openfiler provides a simple way to deploy and manage networked storage.  Installing Openfiler results in a powerful networked storage solution that exports your data via a full suite of industry standard storage networking protocols. Openfiler lowers deployment and maintenance costs for networked storage without compromising functionality or performance. 

Once the installation is complete follow the URL to open GUI of Openfiler.

1) Log in to the url we captured post installation of Openfiler using the username as openfiler and password as password.

2 ) Understanding the GUI of Openfiler

3) Configure Network Access and update the changes

4 ) Creating a Partition

5 ) Enabling the iSCSI Target

Refer Openfiler Administration guide for more information

Back To Basics - Home Lab Part 3

In Our Last Blog Posts Home Lab Part 1 and Part 2 we have already seen the installation of our first machine of Home Lab Environment. It's time to proceed further with other Virtual Machines.

Create another Virtual Machine to run ESXi

Beware that running ESXi on a Virtual machine (Nested) is dedicatedly for solving the purpose of home lab and not suitable for production environments.

While creating virtual machine for ESXi i allocated (4 sockets*4Cores with HT enabled) in total i got 16 logical CPU, Memory 6 GB, you can lower down the number of CPU based on the underlying resources you have. (Maybe you can go with 2 logical CPU) but this logical cpu will have a direct relation with the amount of vCPU that you can assign to a virtual machine. 

With above example i used in my environment i can go till 16vCPU for a single VM and later part you can go with  2vCPU to a single VM.

When it comes to installing ESXi host there are few steps that we need to follow below are the screenshots for the same.

Once the ESXi is installed will be Configuring ESXi through DCUI (Direct console user interface).

Once ESXi is installed and we have provided the DNS and IP details it's time when we have to go back to our domain controller and make an entry of this ESXi in forward look up zone to ensure the FQDN is resolvable and both DC and ESXi can communicate.

After successful addition of new host in domain controller we need to verify if testing the management network from DCUI pass.

Likewise we have installed one ESXi and configured it you can go ahead and create as many as VM's you need to host your ESXi. ( I used Name as ESXi4 because i created 4 ESXi's)

Back to Basics- Home Lab Part 2

We have already seen the number of VM's required and also the order of their installation in our last post (Back To Basics - Home Lab Part 1).

It's Time to Proceed Further with the installation of First Virtual Machine. 

Create a Domain Controller Virtual Machine 

Step 1: Allocate CPU and memory resources i have not allocated much resources to this VM (1vCPU and 2 GB RAM) if you want you can do so. 

If your doing this lab on your workstation environment choose the option of creating a new VM from your workstation.

If you are doing on physical box, make sure you have already installed ESXi on top of it and you are able to connect to your ESXi directly from vSphere Client. (Will also see the installation of ESXi once we are done with the installation of Domain controller).

Step 2: Mount the ISO ( i used win2k3, we can also go for win2008, 2008R2)

Step 3: Power on your VM and proceed further with the installation of guest os.

Step 4: Once the guest operating system is successfully installed open command prompt and run dcpromo command and proceed further with the installation steps as show below.

We have now successfully installed the first machine as per flow, don't forget to allocate ip address to this VM. As mentioned in our last post of this Home Lab Series.