vSphere with Tanzu LAB Environment Installation Step-by-Step (Included vCenter, vSAN, NSX, Supervisor Cluster and pfSense)-2
Nested ESXi Node installations and configuration on Physical Infrastructure
We are preparing a VM template for ESXi Nodes that we will install on Nested Infrastructure.
We choose Other/VMware ESXi 7.0 as the Guest OS. The following warning is not important because we will already create a LAB environment.
On the sizing table below, you can see at least how much resources we need to allocate for VMware vSphere with Tanzu.
I’m setting up 16 CPUs and 96GB Memory for Nested ESXi Nodes.
Because ESXi Nodes will be Nested, we activate the Expose hardware assisted virtualization to the guest OS parameter on Hardware Virtualization.
We add 3 virtual disks.
64 GB OS Boot (ESXi will be installed on this disk)
100GB Cache Disk (vSAN Cache Tier)
1000GB Capacity Disk (vSAN Capacity Tier)
NOTE: Select all the disks you created as Thin Provision, otherwise the Datastore will be filled immediately on the Physical Infrastructure! :)
We are adding 4 Network Adapters for Nested ESXi node.
1 and 2 are going to be used by Nested Infrastructure for MANAGEMENT VDS.
3 and 4 are going to be used by Nested Infrastructure for TRUNK VDS.
We mount the ESXi ISO we have downloaded and save the settings.
After all the settings are completed, we start Power-on for the Nested ESXi Node we created.
We are installing on the 64GB disk we created for ESXi Boot.
NOTE: We are going to not use others drives!
After the reboot, we shut down the ESXi server.
We convert this VM we have created into Template.
Using this Template, we create 4 Nested ESXi nodes and power-on them.
We start SID reset with Reset System Configuration for each Nested ESXi node created.
If the SID isn’t reset, these servers can’t be added to the vCenter Cluster later!
After the reset, our root password was also reset, we only use username for login.
We define a new password on System Customization, then we enter our settings over the Configure Management Network.
After the settings are completed, we save the configuration and exit.
After the configuration for 4 Nested ESXi Nodes is complete, we start a DNS query for testing.
We set NTP settings by accessing each Nested ESXi node via JUMP Server.
We activate the SSH service.
We have completed all ESXi node configuration required for Nested Infrastructure.
Part 3.
- vCenter installation and configuration on Physical Infrastructure
- Creation of vCenter Cluster on Nested Infrastructure and adding of ESXi Nodes
- VDS and Port Group configuration on Nested Infrastructure
