VMware vCloud “In A Box” for Your Home Lab

Chris Colotti March 16, 2011 vCloud, vSphere 16 Comments

Storage Configuration of ix-400D:

The ix-400D has dual network adapters which make it well suited to dedicate one of them to your “Production” home network and the other to the ESX Lab “NAS” network.  From above we can see that one is VLAN 100 and the other is VLAN 120.  Therefore we simply tag the physical ports in the switch and assign each port an IP address on the appropriate VLAN.  You also need to enable iSCSI on the NAS as well as configure root access for NFS connections to work from ESXi.  Once this is complete you will be able to add the VMKernel port for NAS/iSCSI access over the dedicated layer 2 link.  I also chose not to enable CHAP and authentication since this setup is all private and separated.  I chose to create a 250GB iSCSI volume as well as a NAS file share.  The NAS share will require IP addresses of the VMkernel ports added to the security list.

Note:  Port #1 is VLAN 100 and Port #2 is VLAN 120 for ESX NAS Access

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6

Tags

About Chris Colotti

Chris is active on the VMUG and event speaking circuit and is available for many events if you want to reach out and ask. Previously to this he spent close to a decade working for VMware as a Principal Architect. Previous to his nine plus years at VMware, Chris was a System Administrator that evolved his career into a data center architect. Chris spends a lot of time mentoring co-workers and friends on the benefits of personal growth and professional development. Chris is also amongst the first VMware Certified Design Experts (VCDX#37), and author of multiple white papers. In his spare time he helps his wife Julie run her promotional products as the accountant, book keeper, and IT Support. Chris also believes in both a healthy body and healthy mind, and has become heavily involved with fitness as a Diamond Team Beachbody Coach using P90X and other Beachbody Programs. Although Technology is his day job, Chris is passionate about fitness after losing 60 pounds himself in the last few years.

16 comments

  1. Matt Meyer
    December 9, 2010 at 8:12 pm

    Very nice write-up. I’ll be doing something very similar soon and this will come in quite handy for sure.

    Reply
  2. dan libonati
    February 21, 2011 at 10:11 pm

    Chris,

    i’m going to buy some equipment to build my home lab.. I’m looking at motherboards that have dual socket should i spend the extra bucks for the second processor? My work loads will be vCloud director, Capacity IQ, SQL, ORACLE, vmware view and file server(and some VDI machines for the wife and kid). I also want to use this setup to demo products ad hoc for customer… thoughts?

    Reply
    • Chris Colotti
      February 22, 2011 at 6:37 am

      If I were to do it again I would have gone dual socket, only because the operations on all the nested ESXi servers for imports and VM deployments has started to spike up CPU. However when those operations are done it drops done but consistently runs 25% on the single socket with all the VMs running at idle

      Reply
  3. Brian
    November 11, 2011 at 11:18 am

    Can you post on how you sized your VMs? (oracle, vESX, etc)

    Reply
    • Chris Colotti
      November 11, 2011 at 11:22 am

      Yes I can do that in a couple weeks. I owe an update to this since I added N-1 in my lab to maintain vCD 1.0.1 and 1.5 plus I added vCO, etc. So I have had on my to do list getting an updated post out 🙂

      Reply
  4. Matthew Graci
    April 20, 2012 at 9:22 am

    Chris

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *


© Copyright ChrisColotti.us 2025, All Rights Reserved.