This morning I woke up to find out that I have been awarded the vExpert Status for 2015. I did come across this information at 6 am and had to double check to make sure.
For me its a really great honour and something I’ve wanted for a while.
Before i sign off I want to say thank you to the vExpert team for assigning this award to me and congratulations to all the new vExperts out there.
I guess the next thing is to make sure I keep it in the 2016 nominations.
2. Select Home and the Hosts and Clusters
4. Select the Create New Virtual Machine and Click Next.
5. Give the Virtual Machine a name and select the Datacenter we created in Part 7 and Click Next.
6. Select your physical host for the Compute Resource and Click Next.
6. Select the disk you want to run the ESXi host on and Click Next. If you have both a SSD and a HDD look to put the primary disk on the HDD. Once ESXi boots it runs mostly in memory.
7. Select Compatable With: ESXi 6.0 and later and Click Next.
7. Guest OS Family set to Other and Guest OS Version: Version ESXi 6.x and Click Next.
8. Ok so a fair bit to do here:
8.1. Set the VM to have two cores and one CPU. This will save on licensing if you have a VMUG advantage subscription. In addition you need to tick the Hardware Virtualization check box to pass through the additional virtualization features of the CPU. If you don’t you’ll get an error during install.
8.2. 6 GB Ram as the minimum supported with VSAN enabled nodes.
8.3. Your first HDD reduce to 10GB
8.4. Add three additional Nic’s. Set them in this order. NIC 1 and NIC2 on the VM Network, NIC 3 and NIC4 on the LAN Network. Ensure that you set you NIC type to VMXNET3.
8.5. Add two disks. One SSD and One HDD. The SSD can be small,10GB, if required. and the HDD should be at least 50GB. If you don’t have an SSD, have a look at the end of this post and I’ll include a link to instructions which will show you how to “fool” ESXi into thinking you have a SSD when you don’t.
8.6. Add the ESXi ISO to the new CD/DVD Drive, check the Connect Check box.
8.6. Click Next,
9. Review your changes and click Next.
A brief pause here to look at what we’ve built. One ESXi VM with the components necessary for to to be a part of a VSAN cluster.
10. Power on the VM. Right Click the VM and select Power On.
11. Open a console to the VM. (Click Launch Remote Console).
12. Boot Strapping and kernel goodness loading
11. More goodness
12. Press Enter
13. Press F11
14. Select the small 10GB disk (not the SSD).
15. Choose your keyboard type and press Enter.
16. Enter in your root password and confirm.
17. Scanning
18.1 This error will appear if you have not set the Hardware Virtualization Flag in the CPU settings of the VM and you’ll need to go back and set it.
18.2 Example of the Settings.
19. Press F11.
20. Installing.
21. Press Enter
22. VM rebooting.
So in the previous post we added our primary host to the vcsa we built in part 4. Before we build our first virtualized ESXi host we need to add a single standard virtual switch. The foundation for this is discussed in part 2, please take a moment to read it as we’ll be using some of those details.
We want the primary network layer to look like the diagram below. two standard switches. vSwitch0 will already have been created by default and you’ll have a few VM in the VM Network already. The second, vSwitch1, will have only one port group, which I have called LAN. This port is going to be trunked to all VLANs. In addition we’ll also set the configuration for VM Network so that nested ESXi servers pass traffic from their nested VM’s correctly.
2. Select Home and the Hosts and Clusters
4. In the right hand pane:
4.1 Click Manage.
4.2 Click Networking.
4.3 Click Virtual Switches.
4.4 Click the “VM Network” port group and click the edit icon.
That’s the VM network setup. Now we want to setup a new vSwitch with a single port with the same security settings as above.
1. Carrying on from above. Select the icon to create a new standard vSwitch.
2. Select Virtual Machine Port Group for a Standard Switch. Click Next
3. Select New standard switch. Select Next
4. Select Next.
5. Click Next. This warning is just to let you know that the switch doesn’t have any physical NIC’s associated with it, which is fine for our lab.
5. Name the virual port group (I chose LAN) and set the VLAN ID to 4095. VLAN 4095 is the promiscuous vlan. Click Next
6. Select Next.
7. A new standard virtual switch has been created. You still need to configure the security settings of the switch following the process above.
We now have everything we need to install the virtual ESXi servers (post 8) and VSAN (post 9).
6. Once your user is added assign a role and select OK.
As in the previous post, if you haven’t done so already, you need to install the Client integration plugin which can be found in the iso at vcsaVMware-ClientIntegrationPlugin-6.0.0.exe.
Firstly unpack the ISO to your local drive. C:/temp for example.
1. Double click on vcsa-setup.html. (found in the unpacked ISO).
3. Select Install
5. Enter in the IP address, username (usually root) and the password of the ESXi server you are deploying the PSC to.Click Next.
6. Accept the certificate warning by clicking Yes.
7. Enter in the name of the VCSA and give it a password. Click Next.
8. On this screen you have three choices. For our lab we’ll select “Install vCenter Server (Requires external Platform Services Controller)“. Click Next.
9. Now here we’ll want to enter in the details of the PSC we deployed previously, entering in the PSC name and the SSO password. Its usually best to leave the SSO port at 443. Click Next.
10. Leave the appliance size at tiny. Click Next.
11. Select the datastore you want to deploy into and select “Enable Thin Disk Mode“. Click Next.
12. Select “Use an embedded database (vPostgres). Click Next.
13. Carefully, enter in the networking details, tick “Enable ssh”. Click Next.
14. Check all your config details. Click Finish
So back again.
In this post we’ll look at installing the Platform Services Controller (PSC).
Forgetting about ESX for a minute, this new iteration of vSphere is, in my opinion, a huge leap forward for administrators. It feels like the virtual appliance architecture has finally come of age. The split of duties makes a great deal of sense. The PSC is responsible for Single Sign On (SSO), Licensing, and as a Certificate Authority, while the VCSA hosts the inventory service, the web client and others.
So why on different appliances for this lab? Well going forward, in future blog posts, we’ll look at connecting a second VCSA to the PSC.
This first VCSA and PSC will lay the foundation for this and future labs
OK onward.
To install the VCSA and/or PSC you you will need to install the VMware client intergration plugin. can be found in the iso at
This part of the installer does assume that you have a DC up and running. If you don’t you should get one setup before continuing as we will need it later, if you choose to follow that part of the guide.
Once that’s done we can fire up the installer and get the PSC installed.
Firstly unpack the ISO to your local drive. C:/temp for example.
1. Double click on vcsa-setup.html. (found in the unpacked ISO).
11. Networking is King here and you’ll need to be vigilant going through this. For the time sync select “Synchronize appliance with ESXi host” and tick “Enable ssh”. Click Next.
| Use | Example IP Range | Note |
| VM and Management | 192.168.0.0 | Best to use you existing home network. |
| VSAN (vlan 30) | 192.168.100.0 | Internal Only |
| vMotion (vlan 40) | 192.168.110.0 | Internal Only |
It is considered best practice to separate out various types of network traffic. Usually you would separate out your VM traffic from your management but for this lab we will keep them together. We will separate out vMotion and VSAN traffic though.
ESXi: When I’m designing a vSphere environment with rack mount servers in mind I usually separate management traffic out into a separate standard virtual switch (2 x 1g ports) and all other traffic is sent to 2 x 10g ports through a distributed virtual switch using vlans to separate the traffic further and NIOC to control bandwidth.
All righty then, what’s this going to look like for us?
In Workstation:
So far, so good. For Workstation nothing else needs to be done.
As you can see from the ESXi image above I haven’t specified a physical adapter for vSwitch1, With ESXi if network traffic is on the same VLAN and on the same virtual switch, it won’t go the the physical switch. The virtual switch, an in memory construct, will just pass the traffic along, however if you need to cross VLANs, the traffic will need to be passed to the physical switch for routing across VLANs. In this case, its very handy as we won’t want traffic to pass between the VSAN port group and the vMotion port group. EDIT: What we want to do is set-up the LAN port group with VLAN 4095. This will enable ESXi to pass the vlan traffic about correctly.
Now is ESXi we need to make two changes to the vMotion and VSAN port groups, Enable Promiscuous Mode and Forget Transmits:
William Lam of Virtually Ghetto has a great write up here discussing the reasons for this.
So those are the networking eccentricities, Next we’ll look at getting our first VCSA with a dedicated Platform Services Controller up and running.
Just a note: I had hoped to post this sooner but family and holiday commitments took over.