Building VMware Practice Lab

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The VMware lab setup tutorial is designed to help create a small lab environment consisting of three ESXi hosts, one of the three hosts will host vCenter, and therefore need to have more resources than the other two hosts. . A host with vCenter requires at least 12 GB of RAM (10 GB for vCenter, 2 GB for other virtual machines), and 6 vCPUs. Each ESXi host will have four network interfaces, namely management, storage, vmotion, and data (see the downloadable diagram below), and each ESXi will be able to connect to network-based storage targets (iSCSi and NFS shares). This VMware lab setup can be rented on test hardware, please click here to book a meeting.

ESXI Host Settings (more explanation of the useful links section):

On each ESXi host interface, vmnic0 is used for mgmt, vmnic1 for storage, vmnic2 for vmotion, and vmnic3 for data networks.
The ESXi host is up and running.
First, you will connect to the Windows Management PC (Login - labuser / Labroot12!@)
Connect to each ESXi host from the PC through a browser (FQDN provided on this page) (Login - root / Labroot12!@)
The IP address of the network interface can be found in the download map.

vCenter installer:

Download vCenter here (60-day free trial, unable to download eval version after 60 days expire)
The above download must be done on the Windows Management PC
Download the ISO image, open it as a CD, and find the folder named vcsa-ui-installer
Start installer.exe from the win32 folder to start the installation.
Following the guided step-by-step installation process, the ESXi server can also be used as an NTP source or any NTP source of your choice.
The required IP address can be found in the drawing
This setup will be performed in two stages and requires the correct information, otherwise it will fail and the installation will take time.
The DNS server IP to use is 192.168.100.5
Use thin disk allocation to avoid keeping all available disk space.

Storage connection:

iSCSI and NFS share targets are located on server - 10.1.2.5
You need to use an HBA connection to add to the target (in the storage configuration of ESXi or vCenter)
Each ESXi host must create a VMK interface (as shown in the figure on this page), and assign 10.1.2.x IP and upload it to vmnic2 to access the storage.

Sub VM settings:

Install 1 VM on each ESXI host
IP address can be found in the drawing
The ISO image of the child virtual machine can be downloaded from here, as well as other useful software.
The image to use is: turnkey-wordpress-14.2-jessie-amd64.iso
Allocate 256 MB of RAM and 1x vCPU to this VM
After successful installation, you will be able to access the website homepage through the Windows Management PC


Laboratory information and instructions:

If you have already booked your server time, log in to the lab console below and email your credentials during the booking process. To book a new time, click here.

Log in to email user/pass via link above
Level 2 certification, emailed
The device list will show the connection - window, esxi, vcenter
Connect from listed connection to Windows 7 PC, with - labuser/Labroot12! @
ESXI login details - root / Labroot12! @
vCenter login root, administrator@testclue.local / Labroot12! @
Please use root user or administrator as user, Labroot12! @ for any other vmware device you deploy
The laboratory will automatically destroy after 10 minutes from the end of the meeting
Device FQDN (all available from Windows 7 Lab PC):

ESXI-1 - https://ESXI-1.testclue.local
ESXI-2 - https://ESXI-2.testclue.local
ESXI-3 - https://ESXI-3.testclue.local
vCenter - https://vcsa.testclue.local
The network map provides the virtual machine's IP address
DNS server - win2k12.testclue.local(192.168.100.5)
Useful links:


For troubleshooting and technical discussions, use this forum:

Questions during the experiment class

Have problems during the lab meeting? Please email support@testclue.com and we will respond to your question within 10 minutes. Frequently asked questions can also be discussed and supported through the forum. Loss of connectivity, loss of connectivity to the lab portal, topology changes, etc. can be sent directly to support@testclue.com

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