The Hyperactive Blog

Introduction

As some of you already might know I'm virtualizing a couple of machines at home with a low power consuming ESXi-host based on an i3 CPU with 16GB of RAM. For me it is sufficient to run my day to day needed VM's like a DC, PPTP VPN target, an XP Management machine, and most importantly my Ubuntu-machine which runs Sick Beard, Couch Potato and Sabnzbd...

Nevertheless, as a training and hopefully once being a v-Expert (whether it is with Hyper-V or vSphere) it's important to have your own lab... Since I'm just a young guy with a passion for V I thought a real server would come in handy... So via via I bought a very cheap server based on 2 Xeon' 5670 with 6 cores, running with HT that equals 24 "cores" according to ESXi along with 24GB's of RAM combined with an Intel SSD and for connectivity 6 NIC's... Enough with the bragging now...

This server suits itself perfectly to run my ghetto-lab... For those of you who are not familiar with this term: it is a lab-environment, not running according to best practices but with some concessions to enable people like me to test functionality or experiment with it to improve their knowledge... In my case it wil be my server running the following machines:

• vCenter5 on Windows 2008 R2
• vESXi 1
• vESXi 2
• vESXi 3

The Ghetto-lab

That's right, you're reading it well... VMware's vSphere is able to run it's own hypervisor virtually... The fun thing about this is, that you can give as many virtual devices as you want to your vESXi's... You're only limited to RAM and diskspace on your underlying pESXi (physical ESXi). So with this setup, you have to look at all my VM's stated above, and think of them as physical... Don't think about the underlying server (the "iron" or in my terminology the "pESXi"), think of all those machines as physical...

So, starting with this, you can test almost everything you want as a training IT professional, and my first journey with this lab was one with VSA...

But, before testing the VSA, we need to prepare some VM's so ESXi can be ran virtually, I followed these clear steps (look for "Creating vESXi 5.0 Instance using Hardware Version 8") and hey presto, in about an hour I had 3 running vESXi's. Don't forget to add enough NIC's to your vESXi's (but hey, since they are V, you can add as many as you want, right )

On with the VSA Installation now!

VSA or "VMware Storage Appliance" is a software appliance provided by VMware and targeted for the SMB which can't or don't want to afford a physical SAN. In a nutshell, what it does is: it transforms your local storage of each ESXi host to a datastore which is replicated and accessible by the other ESXi-hosts... Doing so enables SMB's to virtualise and profit of the features like vMotion and HA which are provided with the more advanced licenses of vSphere 5...

During the last two months I tried setting up a VSA cluster... First I tried to do it with two physical machines (the dual Xeon and a i5-based machine which I had to build for my brother in law) due to the fact my brother in law needed the PC and I ran into some troubles trying to set it up, I didn't have enough time to build my VSA-cluster correctly...

Nevertheless, I started again, and I want to share my troubles and the solutions for installing a VSA cluster on a lab environment...

First of all: this is the thread which helped me a lot at finding the problem which was preventing me from installing VSA: http://communities.vmware.com/message/1830834#1830834

As you can see, I got a couple of error messages which prevented me from starting the VSA Manager plugin...

The installation itself

First of all:

• Make sure your installation of Windows 2008 R2 is completely "greenfield", which means: NO ROLES installed, only your Windows Updates of that day...
• Make sure you install your vCenter with standard port-parametres, using VSA fails if vCenter is not running on port 80 and 443 (my Achilles-heel of my setup)

The first steps in troubleshooting my failed installation was that when I ran a



I got a list back which stated that something with PID 4 (which is NT Kernel according to Task Manager) was occupying port 80 (HTTP)... So after some Google'ing around I found that on some servers there is a service running called "WindowsRM" which is responsible for some kind of web-interfaced management channel which occupies port 80... After disabling this service I still got an error, but now stating that IIS was still installed. Very surprised about this, I checked if the IIS-role was installed and it was... Removing it, rebooting the server to be sure and I could go on with my installation of vCenter 5 running on default ports and without errors or warnings...

Grab the latest VSA-binaries and install the .exe (you can find it in the ISO-image which you can download from VMware.com) on your vCenter machine, since you're doing this install with the exe, you can do the complete install manually so you'll learn more about it than if you were just running the autorun-scripts on the ISO...

Because you are running a ghetto-lab, and VSA is checking for EVC, you'll have to disable this check... You can do this very easily by going to:


code:

1	c:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\tomcat\webapps\VSAManager\WEB-INF\classes

and look for the file: "dev.properties", in this file you might find this line:
"evc.config=true", change this to "evc.config=false" or create this line if it isn't present...
As a finishing touch, first (!) restart the VSA service and afterwards the vCenter-service in the services.msc panel to make them both aware of the new hack...

Now, open a vSphere Client session to your vCenter, create a datacenter and add your hosts to this DC...

Secondly, open a new vSphere Client and connect to your pESXi, open the properties of the switch which is connected to your vESXi's and make sure to set the exception policies as shown in the following image (I don't know which are needed, so I enabled all 3 of them and suddenly I could proceed with the installation procedure)...



Normally now you can start the installation on the vSphere client to your ghetto-lab...

Enjoy it... If something isn't clear, let me know trough DM or a comment below and I'll try to elaborate or clarify!