Finally - My ESX Lab is Ready

Discussion in 'Virtual and Cloud Computing' started by JohnBradbury, Jul 13, 2009.

  1. JohnBradbury

    JohnBradbury Kilobyte Poster

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    This weekend I got to spend some quality time setting up my new home lab. I'd gone back and forth trying to decide whether or not to go with ESX or Hyper-V (I changed my mind almost daily).

    However we do use ESX in work and with the biggest market share it's a good skillset to have on your CV.

    Anyway I installed OpenFiler 2.3 on the first ProLiant ML115, this will be my iSCSI target for the ESX hosts. I had a few problems with this in initially as the web interface wouldn't allow me to create any volume groups, which in turn stopped me fron creating any volumes. Turns out that this is a know bug that can happen when you setup your drive partitions during the setup process. The advice was to rebuild and manage the disks through the web interface. Doing it this way I had no problems and had my two LUNs setup very quickly:

    VMStorage - 1TB
    ISOStore - 512GB

    Next I installed ESXi onto two 2GB Flash Pens, the HP ProLiant ML115s have an internal usb slot directly on the motherboard which is really great for this. I was suprised at just how quick the ESX installation was, just had to update my root password and the network config and I was done.

    After that I setup a VM for VCenter - this installation took quite a while. Ideally I would have prefered to install this on another physical host but for now this will have to do. Going forward I might do away with OpenFiler and replace with Windows 2008 storage server for the iSCSI storage and VCenter install.

    Setting up a cluster in VCenter was a piece of cake - the same was true of DRS. I did however have a problem with HA, it kept failing during the agent installation (DNS issue).

    [​IMG]

    I still have a few problems to iron out (VMotion seems a little slow and my hosts keep showing errors about HA) but on the whole I'm happy :-)
     
  2. Phoenix
    Honorary Member

    Phoenix 53656e696f7220 4d6f64

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    HA really loves DNS
    check that your DNS is bulletproof or expect problems alllll the time
     
    Certifications: MCSE, MCITP, VCP
    WIP: > 0
  3. zebulebu

    zebulebu Terabyte Poster

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    Amen

    It took me about two weeks to figure out where my HA issue was coming from (capital letter in one of the hosts - which had been amended but was still knocking around in a config file!!)
     
    Certifications: A few
    WIP: None - f*** 'em

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