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Home Lab PowerCLI Starwind Virtual SAN Virtualization Vmware

Home Lab 2.0 – Starwind VSAN : The Greatest addition to my Home Lab

At the end of my previous post about The Beast I mentioned about lacking shared storage for my Virtual Hosts. My first thought was to go out and purchase a NAS like a Synology or a QNAP NAS. However I am trying to do this on the cheap and an extra $1200 when figuring in the cost of drives is just not in my budget. Now I am not sure about Synology, but I believe that they are comparable to QNAP in the sense that you can present disks as iSCSI LUN. Which I have done several times in the past and works brilliantly.

So here I am sitting in my office looking at the Beast and I was racking my brain trying to figure out what I can do with all this storage in this one box and how I can share it among my Virtual Hosts. I started looking at FreeNAS and running it as a VM in VMware Workstation and that worked! Until I had a power failure and the virtual disks became corrupted and I could not get them to come back online. Very Frustrating, my search continued.

Anyway, after doing some research I discovered Starwind VSAN. It allows you to take storage on a Windows machine and present it as an iSCSI LUN. I thought this is great and I signed up for a trial which gives you the ability to install it on one host but no graphical interface (it uses PowerShell) but unlimited LUNs. After some quick googling about the syntax I was able t piece together the commands with relative ease. Within a few minutes I was up an running with three new iSCSI LUNs and they were mounted in vCenter.

I mentioned earlier about having issues with FreeNAS and power failures, well ironically we had a power failure but Starwind VSAN came back online without a hitch. I was very impressed with how resilient it was. I have not had the chance to really put it through it’s paces, but so far I think I found a winner.

I plan to s follow up post once I really get off and running to the races so stay tuned for updates.

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Home Lab Virtualization Vmware

Home Lab 2.0 – The Beast

Continuing on our series on my Home lab we now move into present day. Well…. a few months ago at least. As I mentioned in my previous post about my Razor Blade 15, I used that as my home lab until I was able to procure parts for my current hyper converged VMware Home Lab.

Below is my part list for The Beast:

Once all the parts came in I managed to get it all hooked up relatively quickly and without issue. I must admit that this is the first time I have ever used a Noctua Cooler, but it is whisper quiet, and nowhere near as expensive as I thought it would be.

So moving away from the hardware I then installed Window 10 and after 4 hours or so of Windows updates I was finally able to install VMware Workstation Pro 15. Well, almost…. it turns out that Virtualization Support was not enabled by default. But I can get into that at a later time. I then built out a Domain Controller (another 4 hours of Windows Updates) and 3 Virtual hosts (no Windows Updates). Once the hosts were built I then deployed a VCSA appliance.

Now I think I have everything I will need to play with VMware Products. That is until I remembered I don’t have Shared Storage for my Virtual hosts. What ever will I do?!

Stay tuned for my next post in this series, especially if you are looking to build a home lab on the cheap.

I hope you found this helpful and if so please share it with your friends, we could really use your support.

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Virtualization Vmware

Home Lab 1.5 – Razor Blade 15

To continue with my Home Lab Journey Series. In my previous post on the subject I covered what I consider my workhorse laptop. Once I realized that my laptop was just not powerful enough to do what I wanted to do I decided that I needed to look into a different solution. After watching some of my favorite YouTubers it came to my attention that there are laptops that could exceed the 16 GB barrier. So after reviewing some of the videos I came to the conclusion that I should look into Razer. Specifically the Razer Blade 15 as it has the gaming power to allow me to play games (like Skyrim) but it is also portable for me to carry around for presentations.

So after weeks of agonizing over it, I pulled the trigger and finally bought it. At first I was gun shy and definitely had buyers remorse. But after a few days I was able to peel myself away from my HP laptop and make the switch over to the Blade, and my first impression was WOW. It was so fast, powerful, and LOUD. This was all before the 32 GB upgrade which I had to wait for Amazon to deliver. I provided the link to the kit above just encase you were wondering as it was a PiTA to find it.

After the upgrade I then proceeded to install VMware Workstation (I can’t remember the version…. 15 maybe) and then began to deploy vSphere. I was able to deploy VCSA and 3 hosts with 8 GB of RAM each. I was even able to run some (like 2) VMs on those ESXi Hosts. After about 3 months or so I learned that I had more bottle necks that I originally anticipated such as:

  • Memory (32 GB for 3 hosts, vCenter, and Windows 10 was not enough)
  • Network (running off of WiFi, nuff said)
  • Storage (512 GB SSD was not enough)

To combat the network bottleneck I purchased a USB-C dongle with a network connection, and for storage I thought about using a iSCSI NAS but I was not able to convince my Wife to allow me to spend the money at the time. Who am I kidding, I am just cheap and didn’t want to spend the money.

So at this point I am need of additional storage and more memory. That is when I started to think about building my latest creation…. THE BEAST. You can find my parts list here on KIT.CO

I hope you found this post helpful and if so please share with your friends and help us to grow.

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Home Lab Virtualization Vmware

My Journey to my own VMWare Home Lab – The Background

So a while ago I mentioned that I was planning on creating a Hyper Converged VMware Home lab. It has been my dream to have rig at my house that I could play with. Having came from a job where I was a consultant I figured out early that you need a lab to test out configurations and updates before it goes live. I first setup a lab at my previous employer using some old server hardware that we had laying around and was just collecting dust. This was before anyone had ever heard of the word Virtualization. That first lab was built on VMware Infrastructure server 3.5 (yeah I am that old) before that I had been mostly working with VMware workstation and VMware GSX ,you know the one you would install on a Windows server and had an MMC console (Yeah I am that old). That lab became the proof of concept for the company which was the first brick in a very long road to 100% Virtualization. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the beginning of my love affair with everything VMware. From that Lab we started to virtualize non critical servers and then next thing we new we had a SAN and 2 brand new Virtual hosts. My Lab stayed in place but eventually I upgraded it to ESX 4 (yep not ESXi as that was witchcraft). I then went to VMware training and got my first VCP. I came back from that and Immediately started to upgrade my lab to ESXi 5.x. With every upgrade I did my little lab grew larger and better and I took a sense of pride in maintaining it as mine.

Unfortunately the Lab that I setup for myself was taken over by another division and then became their DEV environment which meant I didn’t have a place to try out new things. I tried to come up with alternatives which I will cover in a later posts. But you should always try to stay up on the latest and greatest in our industry. If you don’t you will just get left behind.

If you are interested in setting up your own VMware Home lab you should really check out the VMUG Advantage Program here!

For a mere $200 you will get access to THOUSANDS of dollars worth of VMware Software as well as some Cloud Compute and discounts on training and certifications. I have been a member now for 4 years and the resources that I have gained are invaluable. On the subject of VMUG, you should also be sure to check out your local VMUG as that too can be an amazing resource of knowledge.

I am going to end this post here but if you found this post helpful please share with your friends.

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Tools Virtualization Vmware

Tools Discussion – VMWare Converter Standalone

Today I wanted to talk about VMware Converter Standalone which has been a constant in my bag of tricks for a long time. VMware Converter is a tool that allows you to convert a Physical Machine to a Virtual Machine which can run on a VMware ESXi host or VMware Workstation / Player. You can also use VMware Converter to resize Virtual machines or even convert them from Thick Provisioned virtual disks to thin.

Before VMware Converter was a free Standalone product, it was an add-on to vCenter (version 3-4.1 if my memory was correct) that was licensed by VMware. It enabled you (much like it does now) to convert a physical machine and turn it into a Virtual Machine. Pretty Sweet huh?!

Somewhere between vSphere 4 and 5 they decided to remove it from vCenter as an add on and make it a a separate product and best of all made it free!

During the installation process you are now asked to decide if you are doing a standalone installation or a Client Server install. I will probably do an install guide for this later so I can discuss further as both have their merits.

If you are interested in getting a copy of VMware Converter Standalone you can follow this link. It will also be available on the Tools page once this post goes live.

I hope you found this post helpful and please check back later for more articles.

Categories
Virtualization Vmware

How to install ESXi 5.5

Continuing the saga of building out my VMware home lab I will be covering the process off installing ESXi 5.5 as a Virtual machine in my environment. As stated in my previous posts, I am a VMUG Advantage Member so I do have access to newer versions of VMware software. 
That might make you wonder why I am going with ESXi 5.5, well you are going to have to wait and see what my plan is for that. 
Lets get started with the installation of ESXi 5.5
Once the ESXi .ISO has been booted up on the machine you will be presented with this screen.
Press Enter to boot, or let the countdown continue and it will boot automatically. 

The ESXi installer will load into memory. It may take some time for this to complete depending on how much Memory you have on your machine, so your mileage may vary. 

After all of this you will be presented with the ESXi 5.5 Welcome Screen. Press Enter to continue. 

Press F11 to Accept the End User License Agreement to continue on.
Once you press F11 the install will start scanning the System it is installing on to see what Storage is available. 

On the next screen you will be presented with a list of Datastores that are available to you to install ESXi on. Select the Datastore that you want to use and press Enter. 

You will then be asked to select your Keyboard layout. Press Enter to continue.

Now you will have to set the Root Password for the OS. Once you confirm the password press Enter to continue. 

The ESXi Installer will then can your system again .

You will then be asked to Confirm your decision to install ESXi on the datastore you selected. Press F11 to continue. 

Now the installation will begin, again your mileage may vary as to how long it will take to complete. 

Once the installation has been completed you can press Enter to reboot the machine to complete in installation. 

After the reboot has been completed and the system boots up you will be presented with the following screen. 

This concludes the ESXi install guide. I hope you found this helpful an please check back for more updates to come.

Categories
Virtualization Vmware

How to Create a Virtual Machine using VMware Workstation Professional 15

Continuing on from my previous post, I wanted to go through the process of creating a Virtual Machine with VMware Workstation Professional 15. Mostly because the last time I did a how to create a VM post, it was a few years ago and it was vCenter 5.5, and because I will be building off of this for future posts.
So let’s get started.
Launch VMware Workstation Professional 15 Pro and you will be presented with the following screen. 
You will want to click on the Create a New Virtual Machine Button (Circled in Red below)

That will launch the New Virtual Machine Wizard.

From here you will want to select either Typical or Custom for your installation configuration. For the purposes my installation I am going to go with a Custom installation. 

After selecting Custom click Next. You will be presented with the option to choose your Virtual Machine Hardware Compatibility. 

As as you can see from the drop down menu below there are many options to choose from. Each option has different compatibility requirements which also brings different limitations. Also remember that Newer Hardware Versions will not be compatible with older versions of VMware Workstation, so if you have to move between versions please keep that in mind. 

For our purposes I will be Selecting ESXi 6.5, which should allow me to import this VM into an ESXi environment without needing to use VMware Converter. I will probably cover this in a later post. 

After making your selection, click Next to specify the OS for your Virtual Machine. You can either select and Installer disk, and Installer Image File (.iso), or I will install the Operating system later. For the purpose of this post I will be installing from a Image File (.iso). 

Click on browse to be prompted to select your Image file.

Select your installer Image File and click Open to continue. 

Depending on the .ISO you are using as the installer, VMware Workstation will attempt to determine what Operating System (OS) you are trying to install. This will also provide recommended settings based on your OS.

Click Next to continue on to name your Virtual Machines and specify where I want the Virtual Machine files to be located.

Click Next to move on to set Processor Configuration. The Processors are capped at the total number of Virtual CPUs available on your machine. If you try to over provision your processor you will get a Error message. 

Click Next to continue on to set the Memory for the Virtual Machine.

As you can see there is a “Recommended Memory” setting when you get to this screen. This is gathered from the .ISO check a few slides back. Click Next to continue on.

For Network Type you have 4 Options as seen above. The default is to use network address translation. This setting is all dependent on how much access you want to give to your VM. Do you want it to be accessible to or from your network? Perhaps you are setting up a VM to test some dangerous program? All these things you need to consider before clicking Next to continue. 

On this screen you will need to select your I/O Controller. I went with the recommended setting and clicked Next to continue.

 On the next screen you will be presented with options for Virtual Disk Type. Depending on what you will pick will determine compatibility with other Hypervisors in the future and can cause a real headache for someone else down the line if you don’t consider your options. I will cover that in a different post. For my purpose I will be sticking with SCSI which is recommended and is also the default selection.  

Next you will be asked to Select a disk from the following option.

As this is a new Virtual Machine I will be selecting Create a new Virtual Disk and Clicking Next.
You will then be presented with the following screen where you can specify the size of your Virtual Disk, if you want to Thick Provision it, and how you would like the file stored. 

Make you selection and Click Next to Continue. Next you will be able to Name the Virtual Hard disk and Specify what storage it will be installed on. 

 

Click Next to continue. Review your settings and Click Finish to continue. 

Categories
Virtualization Vmware

How to install VMware Workstation Professional 15

In my previous post about my new Home Lab spoke about installing VMware Workstation Professional 15. I wanted to follow up with this installation guide.

Once you get the installer downloaded, start off by double clicking it to run it.
At the Welcome screen, click Next to continue. 

On the End User License Agreement, Check the box that says I accept the terms in the License Agreement.

And click Next to continue

On the Custom Setup screen, check the box that says Enhanced Keyboard Driver. Now this will require a reboot of your PC when it is done so just be aware of that. Click Next to continue.

On the User Experience Settings screen, Click Next to Continue. 

On the Shortcuts screen, select which shortcuts you would like to have created as part of the install and click Next. 

On the Ready to install VMware Workstation Pro Screen, click Install.

The Installation will run for a few minutes until it is complete.

Once the installation has completed you will have a chance to Finish the installation or Apply your License now. If you choose to Finish the installation, you will still be able to use the application, but you will be using a Trial License. I will be continuing on with applying the license.

Enter your license key and click Enter.

Once you click Enter, you will be presented with the Completed Installation Screen. Click Finish to end the installation. You will then be prompted to restart your PC.

Click Yes to restart your PC, and once it comes back up, you are good to go!
I hope you found this post helpful, and stay tuned for more helpful guides and tips.