References vSphere / ESXi homelab setup ( Existing lab setup ) Logical Switch setup on NSX ( Earlier post on setting up Logical switches ) Intro This post continues my studying of basic NSX concepts in preparation for my VCAP6-NV. I’ll try and cover some answers I’ve found to some of my mis-conceptions along the way, and finally run a few labs. As a review … Continue reading NSX lab North/South Routing options
Introduction It’s relatively easy to enable vSAN on our Nested lab, so let’s take a short detour. My previous posting on Nested ESX setup is here. And the physical network setup is here. I originally had setup my nested lab with vSAN but immediately got very low disk IO performance of about 2 IOPS, so I switched to NFS storage. Even NFS had sub-par … Continue reading Adding VSAN to my Nested ESXi lab
This part continues to build out NSX on top of the Nested ESX cluster created in the last part ESX/NSX nested lab – Part I. Part I included some basic NSX setup for convenience such as. NSX Manager installed from OVF, and linked to vCenter. Physical network ESXi uplinks included allowed vLAN 100 for vxlan. distributed switch set to allow Jumbo 9000 MTU, (> 1600 MTU … Continue reading ESX/NSX nested lab – Part II
Introduction This post documents my evolving home-lab setup as of December 2018 Since many of my clients are smaller SMB’s they often need hands-on help with physical storage, networking and security in addition to VMware. Since my background was coming from a software ( not IT ) area I needed a lab that used physical hardware ( e.g production servers and network equipment ) Equipment … Continue reading vSphere / ESXi homelab setup
Introduction page Physical Lab setup This part includes setup of Nested ESX VM’s. The second part will include nested NSX. Setup This section covers what worked for me and the major steps required. You may need to reference the listed links for more info. The steps to setup the lab are: I have two ESXi physical host running ESX 6.5 (typical) 128GB RAM, 2 sockets, … Continue reading ESX/NSX nested lab – Part I
Note: I’ve recently re-done my lab and found significant changes to this post, so I’m re-writing this post and splitting it into two parts.
This guide documents how I setup my working nested ESX/NSX lab after having numerous problems setting up the nested ESX 6.5 appliance with NSX with existing documentation. One issue is that most nested ESX/NSX documentation covers ESX5.5, and much has changed since then, and it’s not immediately clear what parts to skip or use.
This guide covers items specific to nested ESXi & NSX. Since this is a lab, only a single NSX controller is used to save resources, but if you have the capacity all 3 can be installed.
Thanks to William Lam’s ESX appliance and blog entries below I was able to get started with nested ESXi, but I continued to have random issues with networking as there are numerous moving parts and most of the physical networking is not described. My lab tries to stay close to production recommendations of keeping networking, storage, and vMotion on separate vLANS, and this lab maintains that separation as much as possible.
I’m moving away from William Lam’s ‘vGhetto ESXi’ appliance, as most of the features added in that appliance are now handled directly by ESXi 6.5 and later such as:
While studying for my VCIX-NV I’ve found some study links of interest.
Nuance of iqlusion 