How to setup ESXi 6.x for home lab use from scratch for Cisco VIRL, GNS3, ETC.

hey what's going on YouTube and welcome to this impromptu video on how to set up ESXi for lab type environment with viral gns3 or pretty much anything that you want really ESXi in general is a pretty big topic and there's a lot of different things that you can do but since i'm setting this up from scratch I thought I would just show you one way on how I'm doing it in case you're interested and as I go through I'll explain why I'm doing it a certain way but just keep in mind ETS X I if you haven't used it there's a lot you can do with it so to begin with I just set up I got some new hard drives for one of my servers and set up a new raid size and you know just put a fresh install of ESXi I haven't done any configuration on it other than give it a management IP and that's it you don't need a big server you can run this on a desktop of any kind because the software here doesn't even know about the raid so even if you just have a single hard drive it's that's fine so anyway now that we're logged in to the main panel oh and I should mention to once I don't recall it seeing this on other servers but when I installed ESXi 6.5 I just did a fresh you know install it actually said that my processor is may not be supported in future versions so I've never seen that message before I'm sure some of you may have but I just thought that was interesting because it's like man I always try to any servers I get try to get old because that's the only way I can afford it anyway I can't spend 10 grand on a brand new server so I try to keep mine under three hundred bucks it's possible so we'll see if you know this will cause problems in the future but at least for this load it should work so under configuration here and they go down to networking and as you can see and it's you just gotta remember that this here is the virtual switch so keep that in mind there's a software-based switch on the physical hardware that then connects to whatever device you have so if you're just using like a little Linksys router or something that is plugged into or you know a commercial type switch just keep that in mind by default or it's not going to do any tagging it's going to be like any normal host so in my case I have a 3750 switch that's connected to it and since I'm using viral undeb used in different VLANs and I do want to be able to from any network in my within my home network be able to talk to the VLAN and have it come in on this network interface and get into the virtual switch environment that the devices are on so in that case what I could do is I could either add another if you have more than one NIC like this you can add additional knit cards and you know configure different VLANs in this case what I'm going to do is I'm just using the one and I'm going to configure is a trunk well it actually Ari is let me login to my switch I'll show you how that's set up so if we go to properties and go to the network management you can see the actual MAC address here so ends in 23 8 and so we can say what I say not 23 died 23 80 so this is on gig 1 0 23 and so here I can you can see that have a description a it set up for cont port and because the mode is trunk ignores this I have the SCP enabled or trusted and spanning-tree portfast and actually it could I change move to some of these ports around for fast trunk so now so strategy for fast trunk and then this can be dangerous manner EBP you filter if you do it between two different switches and on both sides so if you want to see a real spanning tree loop in action that's what you can do but with Viral and the way that I use the remote desktop sometimes when I have a set of actual layer 2 switches and trunks sometimes they'll shut the port down and that be another reason why you want to use another NIC card so if it shuts down that port then when DP use come through then you know it won't disconnect your management interface that since I'm only using one NIC card whenever I put that in there then it just works and I don't have any issues so then the other thing is we look at the VLANs the main ones here that we want to pay attention to are the flat flat 1s mat and int these are ones that are going to be used by viral now you don't need these on your actual switch but like I say in my case I'm going to be using these and I want it to be accessible from any of my network devices so in addition to that I actually have a virtual interface of VLAN 200 with an IP address so that it can route between my different networks and we do 0 at 23 oops not show run to show in mm all right so now you can see that using a o2 one it's set for trunk made of your line is one I don't know if they teach highest sell anymore in CCNA but basically in this case and in regard to 802 dot1q that just means that's the untagged which you can see here VLAN none is untagged for this virtual switch so what we want to do I'll switch this over here see move this up and let's do this we'll do our show view and again so we got our 200 201 202 203 so let's go ahead and first create these and I'm going to create these within the same switch group now let's say you don't want any external connectivity what you could do is just add another switch group and but don't use any physical knit cards just uncheck the knit cards and you could just call the flight siloed Network and you could make this all so any devices that you setup you can use any VLAN you want and we'll all stay within this switch group but there's no physical adapters so broadcast messages going out won't actually go out your physical interface but in my case what I'm going to do is actually build upon this and so I'm going to call one let's say flat is going to be VLAN 200 X and then flat one is going to be 201 and [Music] as Matt is going to be 202 and int is going to be 203 so now you can see these groups these switch groups are part of this same virtual switch so any broadcast from here that our sent is actually going to go out this network interface as well and I do want that in this case because we're going to be talking between the real and virtual environment now optionally if you have network storage you can see here right now I just have this blank data store 1.2 terabytes but if I want to have additional storage that's on a that set up for network access what you can do is go to your storage here so say add storage um well I was going to say Mass but I don't see it on here let me check something else here okay so I just checked on my another ESXi version 6.0 and you can see the storage type as disk and network file system as it's going to show you that but apparently it's not there but basically just put an IP in the direction location and it will look something like this I've never used 65 so I'll have to play around with it like I say this is impromptu video here so I guess I won't do that for now so at this point I will deploy the OVS I just downloaded so if I go my downloads I've got my viral all right and will be sick and here's where you can select this one we want flat one and see it didn't recognize it because I didn't have it capitalized but it doesn't really matter and you can actually call these whatever you want the main thing is these are the VLAN mappings for the different interfaces so we'll hit next there and finish and this file was about 5.5 gig right here so I guess that will pause this while this is down or uploading and this isn't necessarily anything specifically related but one thing I do have with my home network is I have a dedicated section for her sorry I can't talk and type at the same time apparently I have a dedicated interface on a NIC card on the machine that I have remote I use just VNC for remote desktop too so if I ever want to do any type of wireshark capture I can capture on the Wireshark interface and based on here this is on j-10 25 right now but you can set it to whatever you want and so we're using GI 1 0 23 so if we wanted to we could actually change this IRA this way you know on our source and so now anything that's going off this interface will be able to see its traffic so we hit start we can see a lot of broadcast multicast but for example because then if I were to even certainly open up a different command prompt here it's already been ping ten ten ten seven you can see the ICMP things come in there so we stop it now so it's just kind of cool because you know you can do your all your pings and so you go oops if we do the reply it's handy for troubleshooting and usually what I'll do is I have on the uplink from my switch to my router so that way if there's a normal activity or something weird going on I can quickly do a centralized packet capture from my switch to this dedicated device and interface it's just handy to have all right so now this is completed successfully let's first of all I'm just going to go to edit and we'll change it's okay alright so that's we can actually change the hardware version if we want to but I'm going up the CPUs we already set these and it's got it doesn't have any cpu force hardware reservations but it has a gig for the memory and so let's see we'll do ok on there now one thing that I've tend to have to do sometimes is add the virtualization embedded feature let's see so if we go back up here to configuration and go to security profile go up to our services and turn on SSH so let's start it here and then pull up putty oops so czt p.m. s-s devices No volumes than datastore now if we do change directory and then viral DMX let's see okay it is there this vhv equal enable equal to a lot of times that's not on there same with the gns3 if you download the OVA for that sometimes that I have to add that manually but it doesn't look like I need to do that in this case so just as a FYI you can add that vhv equals true to then allow embedding or nested VMs because that's essentially what this is the VM within a VM so you don't need this anymore so we can go ahead and stop that for security even though this doesn't have public outside access but now we can go ahead and open it and start our viral setup and again this is kind of the baseline what I want to show you just like how I set the network interface and why now there are many different options that you can do but you just want to get it started here or at least show you how I'm setting mine up in case you want to set yours up similar now all this boots up one thing I haven't done was check to see if the if they've changed any of the install steps because each new version that comes out they add more and more [Music] as far as it's different see this one is four [Music] for 102 six this is valid for version 102 six but they're saying that's the minimum of to be CPUs for you to memory data to see us okay see if there's anything [Music] has changed okay yeah ever since like version zero something that part hasn't changed static IP eventually I'll be doing that doesn't matter for now don't have internet proxies we can validate this part here I usually just boots up really quick so let's see and there's hardly any usage going on here because normally we get a viral prompt by now but give it a little bit longer here I don't know guys tempted to push this button right here then if that doesn't work I'm tempted to push this button right here I'm doing it totally doing it wonderful could be the version of ESX I'm using too because I did get that warning when I installed it saying that my processor may not be supported in the future one way to test is I could install this on version six on one of my other servers and see see if that makes difference I guess I am going to deploy this on another server that is the same processor but version six all right so so you can see he's another server same CPU it has more memory but same exact CPU and it's version 6 and that's 6 5 so and I will also see I have restricted capabilities instruments are okay right so this is around virtual machine 9 what I'm gonna do is just make sure that I set up the new one same 64 gigs ram 8 V CPUs alright completed successfully so let's see what happens here we're going to edit and 64 8 okay stars it's on see what happens all right I'm going to have to redeploy this on the network file server because they don't have enough memory storage I should say standby I think one of the I think the same thing happened in one of my other videos and I was trying to install call manager or something but hang on I'm updating this I'll ride it's completed here I thought this is going to be a quick 10 minute video and then I'll go to bed huh right alright so let's edit again and we'll make this 64 8 ok alright drum roll moment of truth let's see how the other one is doing still sit in there so see it happens on this same processor just different version of ESXi look at that interesting so obviously you can tell already it's moving along see now that's what I expected on this one man I'm probably have to reinstall ESXi 6 apparently so let's see so that's what you want to see acceleration can be used and figured that would happen see and if I pull up a browser to 10-10-10 to a one I think that's what the IP loads of it yes there you go all right well I guess while we're here I can show you real quick how to make a USB bootable media let me see if I have one around here finally pause the video real quick okay guys alright so I've got the USB N and I am going to download the version six I know this works so I'm just going to copy this locally whenever I download these I usually save them to my storage server so I might as well add this one as well and there are a number of different programs you can use but the one I tend to use is go Universal USB installer from pen drive just scroll down here to this Universal USB installer right here and if we run this what I do is choose other I try unlisted Linux brows and we're going to choose 6.0 open and we're going to use H might as well format it you don't have to but I will just to show you yes so as you see here it's going to format it and it's going to burn the image apologize if it keeps getting noisy in here with my furnace on and my the switch I've been moving my phone lab the collaboration lab directly next to me so when I do these videos I can do more because usually all my lab stuffs in the other room which apparently I'll be giving you a tour so so much for my quick 10 minute video but I'll give you a tour of because we got to go then and install this and reset this up alright installation complete and you can just click close and now broke in and we can close this out not so follow me let's get this reinstalled so we'll take our nifty little USB key here sit on into the lab area so you labeled cave and lab smooth and down here you can see my router and switch with the cable modem and DSL DSL currently needs the password updated I'll have that fixed tonight and who needs a firewall when you have a rock and rider lucky to protect your servers put in our USB power on server and here's the installer so just hit enter and you'll see the installer load [Music] all right and we'll just hit enter to continue and s11 to accept the License Agreement and now in this case we're going to choose the logical volume 1.23 care of it and enter to continue [Music] in this case we're going to overwrite the vmss data store so we'll select that and hit OK returned then we'll set up the root password and enter to continue and then s11 to begin the installation and you'll see install now that we're done we'll hit enter to reboot and remove our USB [Music] then I'll begin to boot up and start off process and we press f2 to customize their settings enter the root username password and we'll go down to configure management network and ipv4 configuration and we'll sit the static IP and give it a static IP address subnet mask and Gateway stay the same and then we'll hit enter and we'll go down to our dns configuration and change the hostname you can change the DNS servers if you need to as well and hit enter Save and escape and then we'll be prompted we'll say yes to restart management Network and then xscape again to back out and now we're good to go [Music] alright so now we're back to where we were when we first started this video oh man and it's one o'clock in the morning here I thought it was going to be a quick 10 minute video but that's ok I do this for you guys so now let's sign back in to our new server so we're going to have to install a certificate again because it's new say yes all right so what are we going to do actually just while I'm here I'm curious let me check the storage site choose add storage see there's the network file system that's interesting so it's not on 65 so that also goes to show I just downloaded it because I figured I just saw a new version on there but for production and stuff you it's a good idea to read the release notes so things like that don't happen so I'm going to do for this one I'm say 10 10 10 6 and bleeds it was these shares and in datastore just call this mass finish there we go so we got our network storage I guess a ghost key that was a trick question it's the first thing I was do is add the networks back so let's see we had add new and we had 200 was our oops flat it was 200 finish and flat 2 flat 1 capital F this time was 201 s net is doing and finally int is 203 I think that's all we want for now yeah so we will go back to our file we'll deploy our OVF template again see this time it didn't make me select because it matched exactly with the capital s so we'll go ahead and deploy this again and also I noticed this time there wasn't any message about my processor may not be supported so again I have no idea if it has any relevance or not but just thought that was interesting that I did get that prompt so it's like and if that's the case that's kind of a bummer because the best way for lab stuff is you know to buy stuff that's old unless you know you have bankrolls to buy new stuff but as you saw my both my routers and switches that are all first gen stuff that you can get relatively inexpensive on eBay so alright so that's completed and what are we going to do that's right we're going to upgrade the memory to 64 and now again it doesn't have to be 64 let's just just put whatever memory requirements you have and we will click OK now if at the moment of truth start this up keep our fingers crossed hopefully Murphy doesn't follow me again and follow me all night apparently I'm nervous well guys I honestly can say I am Not sure it's probably that way it's way past my bedtime queue so at least was able to show you what I wanted to as far as how you do a baseline configured configuration in preparing the network and you saw that at least on the other server with the same processor it worked I'm not sure why this is stopping because they now on version ESXi 6.0 I was able to add the network storage because that wasn't even an option on 6/5 but I mess around with this again tomorrow and I'll do an update if it works so I hope at least some of the stuff in here was useful okay so I don't know who I was kidding thinking I'd be able to go to sleep and just let this go so I kept tinkering with it I got it to work but I honestly don't know why or how maybe any of you experts out there might know all I did initially was I changed this to 32 gig and 6 CPUs and then just throw in the dart and then when I started it like this and I went to Advanced Options and I just hit this I didn't even go to recovery mode I ate the one that's already selected so in theory nothing should have changed but when I did that then I was able to boot it up and then I powered it off and then I switched the memory back to 64 gig and 8 V CPUs boot it up again and it keeps working every time now so but until I made that initial memory and I don't know if it was the memory or the processor change that actually did it or if it was going to the advanced menu even though I already selected the default that you know it doesn't make a lot of sense as far as what I did to fix it so and it always bugs me to when I don't know why it took something but maybe I'll do tomorrow this can wait tomorrow maybe I'll do some I'll redeploy the OVA see if I can reproduce it and and then try those steps manually see if I can figure something out with that but the good news is is it's working now consistently and we in theory should just be able to go see 204 oops so now we should at least be able to go to 204 all of that there [Music] all right so then here is where we can then configure the licensing so let me secretly fill this out all right so that's what we want to see so now we've got successful and we're good for at least 30 days and we can actually start our configurations now or I should say then we go through we can set static IP as if we want for this add the extra software they actually have web base they have they still have the VM maestro client but you can also have a web-based tool now you can create all your stuff so that's pretty cool and I'll have some videos on that but the main thing that I wanted to show you in this video was the foundations for getting ESXi set up for and ready for lab use and whether you want to use the real and virtual interactions or just you know virtual by itself and now to set up the network's and/or file storage so that was a lot longer than I planned now that it's 2:15 in the morning but again this is all fun to me so and happy to share it with you so thanks for watching and I will see you guys in the next video

Channel: wmx99

Views: 22,265

Keywords: Cisco virl, vmware, esxi, pendrive, usb bootable, nas, spanning tree, port monitor, 802.1q, trunk, Ubuntu, configuration, home lab, ccna, virtualization, wireshark, vnc, remote desktop

Id: z3WHWrg_h00

Length: 42min 11sec (2531 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 29 2017