Summary

Installation of VMware ESX 3.5 Server, VMware Infrastructure Management for a test lab.
Tags: VMware ESX, VMotion, VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB), Consolidation

The VMware Infrastructure 3.5 comes with two CDs: one for VMware ESX server and the other for VMware Virtual Center/Infrastructure Management

Hardware requirements

Please read VMware documents for the production environment. The below requirement is just for a Test Lab on which you can test all features of VMware ESX 3.5.

  • VMware ESX server:
    • any server Intel/AMD platform that supports SCSI disks, or with SCSI adapter. We can set this server up on desktop mainboard with VMware ESX on SATA disk, and vmfs on SCSI disks.
    • The server shoud have at least 3 network cards: one for console management, one for VM network, one for VMotion/iSCSI/NFS, the first NIC can be 100 MBs, but the two later NICs should be 1000GBs for better performance.
    • The ESX server should have more than 2GB RAM, the more RAM you have, the more guest can be handled by the ESX server. Our VMware ESX server currently has 5 GB RAM.
  • Desktop: any desktop that runs Windows XP Professional. It should have at least 1GB RAM, because of many services running on this desktop.

VMware ESX 3.5 Installation

The installation of ESX 3.5 is pretty the same with one of VMware ESX 3.0.0/3.0.1 or 3.0.2. It’s straightforward for evreryone that knows Linux at entry-level. The only attention is at the step networking settings: we select the lower performance NIC for console management and leave the other better NICs for VM network and VMotion/datastores with iSCSI/NFS.
After installation, restart ESX server. You should create another account besides root, for example, admin1. This admin1 account on ESX server (RHEL 3.x based) helps us to access the server from the desktop via any ssh client (for example Putty) to do some necessary tasks on ESX server at level CLI (command-line-interface). You can use HP iLO, Dell DRAC, IPMI, KVM for the direct access to ESX server, but ssh access still help us a lot, especially on the maintenance/patching tasks.

Minimum ports/services are opened/run, firewall is activated, shh access via root is blocked on ESX server by default. We can reconfigure these ports/services later on via VirtualCenter.

VMware Infrastructure Management/Client Installation

As the older versions of VMware 3.0.x, we don’t need the setup of SQL server for the test purpose, but we will see in this installation process: this ESX 3.5 version sets up a SQL 2005 express server on our desktop instead of MSDE like the previous ESX versions. In the production environment these softwares should be installed on different machines: VMware License server, VMware Virtual Center server and VMware Infrastructure Client, but for my test lab these softwares will be installed on the same desktop beside the MSDE.
First step of this installation is License server. You have two options:

  • Evaluation: you don’t need set up license server if you want evaluate the Virtual Center only. VMware Inc gives you 60 days for this trial from the day you install the VI.
  • Purchase licenses: There are many kind of licenses. You will receive the license file from VMware Inc and you use this file to set up your license server. It’s pretty straighforward.

In this entry I use license file for my Virtual Infrastructre Environment.
To setup Virtual Center on your desktop, load VMware Infrastructure Management CD into your CD-DVD drive, we have screens like following, all screenshots are self-explained.

(click on image to see inage with bigger size)

Read some notices about new enterprise-features of ESX 3.5

continue with setting up this computer as Virtual Center Server. Read carefully the short explaination on screen.

This step is for SQL setup, due to our small scale of deployment we choose the firts suggestion. For production environment the second choice will be recommended (of course the SQL server has been ready on the network before this selection)

Now the choice of license server. Our license server is 192.168.10.45

Enter the VC server IP or its FQDN.

then the username of administrator and password. Pay attention to the credentials given and the add-on softwares at the bottom: VMware Converter Enterprise for Virtual Center server and VMware Update manager. These add-on services will be also installed on our machine.

Click Install to start the installation

If your machine doesn’t have Microsoft .NET 2.0 framework you will see this

Then the prerequisites: SQL server, an Microsoft SQL express server will be installed as well on your machine

             

Now installing VM Infrastructure client, with it we manage our Virtual environment

         

Next to installing VirtualCenter server

VMware Update manager

VMware Converter Enterprise

It’s done.

(to be continued with Virtual DataCenter Configuration)