Building an ESXi server for Network Engineers - Part 1 iDrac7 and Raid Setup

[Music] what's up everyone i'm rafael and welcome to network engineer pro if you're brand spanking new to this channel i'm really glad to have you if you've been here before i'm glad to see you again in this video and the next few that i'm going to be working on we're going to be taking this dell poweredge r620 server and turning it into a virtualization beast for network engineers let me tell you why i got this server the reason i got this server is because i'm a network engineer i'm constantly testing and labbing things out for work studying for certifications or i just straight up forgot how something works so i go and lab it out now i use a combination of different things like csr 1000bs cisco modeling labs even g and just all kinds of other things and i was running all of those on vmware workstation player which is a type 2 hypervisor that's installed on my windows 10 pc now that windows 10 pc is also used for things like video editing photoshop gaming and more and it was just starting to be too much and i was running out of resources so i wanted to get something dedicated for just networking and labbing purposes that i don't have to worry about running out of resources for hopefully a long time this is going to be a three-part mini-series now specifically in this video which is going to be part one i'm going to be taking this server which is fresh out of the box and getting it prepped and ready for an esxi installation esxi is going to be my hypervisor of choice now that preparation means getting the server configured with an ip address for management and getting storage configured in a raid setup part two is actually going to be downloading and installing esxi on the server and part three is going to be installing even g as a virtual machine and getting it fully running with router and switch images in the future i'll show you how to install other things for network engineers in esxi like cml or cisco modeling labs linux vms for ansible and other types of network automation and more so don't worry so this is a used dell poweredge r620 let me give you a really quick tour so it has 128 gigs of ram two eight core e5 2660 processors so that's 16 cores total and they're clocked at 2.2 gigahertz this is an 8 bay server so it's capable of 8 hard drives and i currently have four 600 gig hard drives installed but actually when i got this it came with two 300 gig hard drives so i'm like okay let me get two or three more so on amazon 300 gig hard drives for the server were like 40 bucks so i did a little bit more research and i found a company online called water panther who sells them for half the price but the problem is is that they're always sold out but they did have however 600 gig hard drives for the same price as the 300 gig ones on amazon so 600 gig hard drives it is so i'm really happy with the specs in this server it's going to be a network virtualization beast and i can't wait to get it set up now when you get a server you plug in the power supplies this one has two and i'll show you that in a second and you're gonna connect a keyboard a mouse and a monitor with the vga cable or you could take advantage of the server's idrac7 port on the back idrac stands for the integrated dell remote access controller let me show you so like i said this server has two power supplies and what's really awesome is that these are hot swappable so if for some reason a power supply dies i can get another one online and just easily swap it out they come out really easily and over here i have four one gig nicks these are what i'm going to use to connect the server to my production network and over here i have two usb ports so this is where you would connect your usb mouse and your usb keyboard here's your vga port where you're going to connect that external monitor and this is the idrac port i was telling you about this is a dedicated separate network port just for management of the server so what i can do is i can take a copper ethernet cable plug it into the idrac port that beautiful click sound let the server get an ip address via dhcp or i can assign one statically myself once it has an ip address and it's online on the network i can put that ip address into my web browser and access the idrag gui you want to know why this is awesome because i don't need to connect a monitor keyboard and mouse to the server i can configure and manage everything on the server from my web browser so i've connected the ethernet cable to my idrac port that i just showed you we are ready to get started let's boot this thing up all right so before we get the server powered on i just want to show you a few things so here in the front we have two usb ports if you wanted to plug in your usb mouse or your usb keyboard or maybe a thumb drive with an operating system on it you could right next to it is going to be an sd card slot and then right above this here where it says poweredge r620 is a little rectangular lcd screen it's hard to see it right now because the server is powered off but as soon as i turn it on it's going to light up and you're going to be able to see it and it's from that lcd screen that you're going to configure the ip address for your idrac port you're going to configure it using these three buttons here you have a left arrow a check mark and a right arrow so let's go ahead and get the server powered on so we can get the ip address configured to power on the server you're going to press the power button to the right of the dell logo right here and when it boots up it's going to be pretty loud it's the fan spinning extremely fast after a few minutes it'll settle down so you can see the lcd screen lit up and it's saying system booting all right so now the server is definitely a lot quieter the fans aren't spinning as loudly and if we look at the lcd screen what you see there that's actually the server name you can change that if you want so the first thing i want to do is i want to go ahead and press the check mark and i'm presented here with two options i have setup and view now since the server is fresh out of the box what i want to do is i want to highlight setup and press the check mark so i'll press the right arrow key and then the check mark it's asking me do i want to configure the idrac i sure do and it's asking me here for the idrac do you want the ip address to be assigned automatically via dhcp server or do you want to assign it statically now for this video i'm going to assign it via dhcp but in production typically you'd want to assign a static ip address for your management ports on your servers and once the server is fully set up and running and everything's good to go i'll go ahead and change the ip address to be static so since dhcp is already highlighted i'm just going to go ahead and press the check mark in the middle and that's it it's asking me hey do you want to save your work yes i do i want to save this configuration so i'm going to go ahead and press the check mark now we're back at the server name that we saw here in the beginning so after about a minute the server should get an ip address and we're going to go ahead and verify that all right so to verify the ip address that the idrac port received from the dhcp server what you're going to do is you're going to press the check mark again and remember these two options that we saw earlier we had setup and view now we want to go ahead and highlight view do you want to check your idrac settings yep do you want to check the idrax ipv4 or ipv6 settings here i want to check its ipv4 settings now here you can view the ip address you can view the subnet mask the gateway information any dns server info but for now all i care about is the actual ip address so i'm going to press the check mark perfect i can see that the ip address assigned to the idrac port is 192 168 1.93 now i should be able to ping that ip address and access it from a web browser let's do it all right so now that we powered on the server and we configured the idrac port to get an ip address via dhcp let's go ahead and make sure that we can ping the ip address that it was assigned so i'm going to open up my command prompt and the ip address we got was 192 168 1.93 so i'm just going to do ping 192 168 1.93 great i get a response we're now ready to head to our favorite web browser to access the idrag gui let's do it now that the server's on the network and we can ping it we want to go ahead and access the idrac gui from our web browser so what you want to do is in the address bar go ahead and put the ip address that the server got during its dhcp process so it was 192 168 1.93 here we're at the login screen for the idrac gui now here's the login screen for the servers i drag gui um it's asking for a username and password by default if you don't configure anything the username is going to be root and the password is going to be calvin but be sure to change it once you get logged in all right so now that we've logged in successfully you can see a lot of information about the server so it gives you an overall health summary you know your batteries your fans power supplies things like that down here under server information you can see the ip address that it got some of the firmware version information over here on the right you have quick launch tasks so from this gui you can power on and off the server or reboot it what's really cool is that even if the server server's powered off as long as the power supplies are plugged into a power source and you can ping the ip address you'll be able to access the idrag gui when the server is off which is pretty awesome and then over on the left you can view all kinds of things so if you want to see your idrac settings if you want to go down to hardware let's say you want to check your cpu you can check your cpus here so a lot of really good information let's go back to the overview and this is by far the coolest thing so here's this virtual console so what i can do is i can launch a virtual console and another little browser is going to pop up and it's going to show me the console just if i was actually connected to it with a monitor a keyboard and a mouse so i want to go ahead and click launch and this little thing is going to pop up file can harm your computer yes i want to keep it go ahead and open it up and it's going to say do you want to continue yes i want to continue yes go ahead and run this little thing popped up here let's go ahead and run and here we have our virtual console again this is awesome i don't have to have a separate monitor a separate keyboard a separate mouse as long as i can reach the server's idrac ip address i can get into the idrag gui and launch the virtual console so now that we're done with the ip address portion for management we need to get the storage setup so like i mentioned earlier in the video i have four 600 gig hard drives installed but the problem is that they need to be formatted i need to get these four hard drives formatted into one giant virtual disk once that's done i can then install my hypervisor and the one that i want to install is going to be vmware esxi but it can be whatever you want windows server 2019 whatever you prefer so you can see here that it says strike f1 to retry the boot um let's go ahead and do that so now it's going to reboot and what we want to do is we want to press ctrl r this is going to give us access to the raid configuration so once it tells us hey you can go ahead and press ctrl r let's do it here's where we want to press ctrl r okay perfect now here you can see the two 300 gig hard drives that i mentioned earlier that came with the server i then got four 600 gig hard drives but they're not showing up here so what you want to do is you want to make sure that your hard drives that your physical disks are raid capable so the way that we're going to do that is that if you look up here we're under vd management for virtual disk we want to go to physical disk management over here on the right so to go to the next page you want to press ctrl n here i'm under my physical disk management and you can see here that these two 300 gig hard drives are ready i don't want them to be ready i don't want to use them so what you want to do is when you have a disk highlighted press f2 because down here on the bottom f2 is for operations so when the disk is highlighted press f2 and what you want to do is you want to convert it to a non-raid converting disk deletes all existing data on the disk yes i want to proceed let's go ahead and do that for the last 300 gig hard drive okay great now what i want to do is i want to convert these four 600 gig hard drives and make them raid capable so you can see even though they're 600 uh they're only showing 558 so let's go ahead and press f2 and i want to convert to raid capable warning it's going to delete everything on the disk okay that's fine do the same thing for this one same thing here convert to red capable same thing here convert to raid capable so now what i want to do is i want to go back to the previous page so i'm going to press ctrl p so now the four 600 gig disks are ready to be configured in a raid so what you want to do is you want to go up here to where it says no configuration present and you can see that by default the default raid level is a raid 0. that's not what i want i want to raid 5. i want a disk to fail and i want to be able to replace that disk without losing any data so i'm going to hit rate 0 and i'm just going to pick raid 5. now you can see here that i have each disks here again each physical disk and in between these brackets we need to have something here so it's indicating because there's nothing in between these brackets that they're not selected so let's just go ahead and press enter and you see how an x is put there let's go ahead and do that for all four disks because these are the four disks that i want to be in my raid you can see here that the virtual disk size is going to be 1675 gigabytes that is gonna be the size of the virtual disk and i'm gonna press ok it's saying it's recommended that all newly created logical drives be initialized we are going to initialize them so hit okay now that we have our virtual disk here highlighted what we're going to do is we're going to press f2 and we're going to go under initialization and we're going to hit start initialization so it's saying okay you're going to initialize these four disk and you're going to hit ok and you can see here that the process is zero percent this is probably going to take a while so once it hits 100 we'll come right back all right so the process is finally complete it took a really long time i think at about four hours it wasn't even at fifty percent so i just left it overnight and checked it in the morning but you can see here that for virtual disk zero we're at a raid level of five so we're at a raid five and our virtual disk size is 1675 gigs so we took those four 600 gig hard drives and combined them into one giant virtual disk so let me go ahead and press escape yes i want to exit and i want to press ctrl alt delete to reboot so what i'm going to do is up here on the upper left i'm going to go to macros and i'm going to press ctrl alt delete and that's going to go ahead and reboot the server all right so at this point we've assigned the server and ip address to the idrac port it's online and connected to the network we looked briefly around the idrac gui and accessed the virtual console and configured the four 600 gig hard drives in a raid 5 and we turn those four hard drives into one big virtual disks so the prep work is about done and we're now ready to install esxi which is gonna happen in part two i hope you all enjoyed the video if you did don't forget to like and subscribe and follow network engineer pro on facebook i put the link in the description if you have any questions comments or suggestions please let me know that's it for this video thanks everyone and have a great day

Channel: Network Engineer Pro

Views: 1,610

Keywords: dell, poweredge, vmware, esxi 6.7, esxi tutorial, homelab, home tech, poweredge r620 boot from usb, dell poweredge r620, network engineer, ccna, ccnp, ccie, packet tracer, eve-ng, gns3, virtualization server, routing, linux, cisco, routers, switches, learn ccna, ccna tutorial, esxi, eve-ng tutorial, networking, home lab, dell poweredge server, idrac7, cisco modeling labs, cml, cisco certification, vsphere

Id: Th6L27picC8

Length: 15min 9sec (909 seconds)

Published: Sat May 15 2021