In the previous part of this article, I’ve shown you where to download the required packages for use with the upcoming laboratory. In this part I will guide you through the very basic VMware ESXi installation on VMware Workstation. For this you will need the VMware Workstation installed on your system, along with the Hypervisor ISO. Without further ado, let’s begin.
Hello and a hearty welcome to my series on making a virtualization lab! In this first part of lab preparation I’ll show you where to get the needed binaries, set up networking in VMware Workstation and create a software RAID0 out of 3 SATA HDDs. I have been wanting to do this for quite some time – and finally, there is no time better than the present. This is because the Lab can be run using the cutting-edge software that was provided to me in the form of vExpert Licenses.
On the hardware side – because I am constrained by budget for this vSphere lab (which equals zero at the moment), I have decided to make use of the most I have available. This means I will be utilizing my Whitebox’s hardware with VMware Workstation 11, and creating a basic lab from the resources I have at my disposal.
At first we’ll take a look on what I have available – only the compute resources used for virtualization will be noted below:
CPU – Intel Core i7-2600k @ 4.05 GHz – 4 Cores, 8 Threads.
RAM – 16 GB 1866MHz DDR3 Memory
Storage – A software RAID0 out of three SATA drives and perhaps a small 60GB LUN from my 120GB SSD – this will be provided by StarWind Virtual SAN software iSCSI Solution which I got a NFR license for (again, thank you vExpert Programme!).
This hardware configuration will enable me to run two ESXi hosts each with 2 CPUs and 6GB RAM. As far as the software goes, I will be using Windows Server 2012 R2 – both Core (for Domain Controller) and the “GUI” (or non-Core edition) to serve as a management console for both of these previous servers.
VMXP 