Nested Home Lab – Part 4 – VCSA

The VCSA 6 now offers feature parity with the windows edition, including the long awaited for linked mode. In fact when you look at the vSphere 6.0 configuration maximums doc it doesn’t have a separate section for the windows deployment and the appliance deployment.

Now in your environment you need to make a decision, Windows based or Appliance based. For me, personally, I’ve long been a fan of the appliance. Its easy to deploy and doesn’t require a windows license, not that I’m against windows at all.

For a small lab it’s quite a beefy install, even at the tiny deployment. 8GB Ram and 2 CPU’s and the HDD requirements can be anything from 30GB to 120GB depending on whether you are using the imbedded controller or not. http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2106572

But given all of that we will cheat a bit with the memory requirements. After deployment, drop it down to 4GB. Please not that this is not supported.

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).

2. Your browser might ask for confirmation before staring the Client integration plugin. Accept the caution.

3. Select Install

4. Select “I accept the terms of the License Agreement”. Click Next.

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.