Installing and Configuring VMware ESXi 7 including Jumbo Frames, iSCSI, and Port Binding

thank you for taking a moment to view our presentation about installing and configuring ESXi 7vm sources cloud and infrastructure is a VMware managed services and cloud provider we have a diverse team of individuals to serve as your first point of contact all of us are based in the USA but we serve clients worldwide wherever there's a need as critical infrastructure responders we don't let hurricanes fires or pandemics get in our way it's our job to make sure that your mission critical systems are online all of the time I'm John boric lead Solutions Architect vm sources still deploys plenty of on-premises systems but right now our main focus is on migrating legacy VMware deployments to our VMware cloud provider partner cloud VM sources VMware cloud is a fully managed single tenant solution at about one-third the cost of the big cloud we're not just saying it's less expensive we're willing to guarantee that it's less expensive and provide a fixed TCO with unlimited usage for the life of your contract one of the key features of VM sources VMware cloud is stretched cluster architecture which automates disaster recovery leveraging pre-existing metro area networks between regional coresight facilities we provision an active site and a failover site in the event of primary facility failure all of your compute will failover to the secondary site automatically because we use designated site pairs everything fails over automatically IP addresses routers virtual machines everything VM sources VMware cloud provides the support you require where and when you need it for day-to-day management you'll rely on the VM sources team that you know by name and have come to respect four critical situations we have a 24 by 7 NOC monitoring all aspects of infrastructure and operations in the unlikely event that neither the VM sources team or NOC can resolve an issue we also have VMware OEM support backing us up let's dive right in and look at installing VMware ESXi 7 we've already connected the ESXi ISO image that we downloaded from VMware or our server vendor and now the ISO image is loading to ram this happens pretty quickly on modern servers now that the ISO image is loaded we're starting the hypervisor and all the hypervisor related services it is in fact true that the entire installation process of ESXi occurs as a subset of the hypervisor and as you'll be able to see in the subsequent steps the installation of ESX i7 is not substantially different from version six point five or six point seven this is what you'll see if there's been no previous installation of ESX in this location otherwise you'll have an opportunity to upgrade or reinstall I'm simply going to choose enter to continue I'm gonna choose my keyboard I'm gonna set a password and then repeat that and I'm going to press f11 and we're off to the races it's as simple as that now that ESXi seven has completed installation we're going to go ahead and restart the server the default behavior will be to eject the ISO media so we're simply going to press ENTER for a reboot and we'll wait for the server to reboot completely first it loads to ram then the hypervisor and now our server is completely booted as you can see it's got a DHCP IP address we're gonna want to use what's known as the DC UI or direct console user interface to set certain initial parameters before we move on to using the embedded host client I'm gonna go ahead and press f2 and enter my password this is the direct console user interface in reality the only variable we were able to set during installation was the password you can see that that reports as set so we'll leave that alone but we'll move down to configure management Network and we can see that we're set to V on NIC 0 pretty standard usually don't need to change that depending on the physical configuration of your environment you may or may not need to set a feeling we do not in our environment so we're gonna move on we're gonna select ipv4 configuration and we are going to choose set a static IP address for this host now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to use my right arrow because I don't like to type and I'm only gonna modify as few parameters as possible so I'm setting my static ipv4 address to 172 20 dot 100 dot 101 which is our lab network the subnet mask and Gateway can remain with the DHCP provided values and I'm gonna press ENTER now before I move on I'm gonna be sure to go to my dns configuration and I'm going to set my hostname it's highly important to set both DNS and a host name for your ESX host and I'll press ok and then I'm gonna press a skate I'm gonna select yes to reload my network configuration last thing I'm going to do is go to troubleshooting options and I'm going to enable SSH and the shell I'm a big believer in SSH and command-line Diagnostics and you'll find that I prefer to secure my management networks rather than disable SSH on an ongoing basis and there you go we finished configuration with the DC UI and our host is ready to login using a web browser and the embedded host client now that the initial parameters have been set using the DC UI we're gonna want to go ahead and continue configuring the ESX server using the embedded host client we're gonna open Google Chrome and type in the IP address of our ESXi host and we're going to append to the IP address UI which is going to get us to the embedded host client we're gonna use the username root and the password that we've specified earlier and since this is purely a lab environment I am NOT going to join the VMware customer experience improvement program we can see that there are a number of default alarms which we will be taken care of as part of the initial configuration using the embedded host client but the first thing we're gonna need to do is configure I scuzzy storage and then move forward let's go ahead and go to networking we're gonna choose add a standard virtual switch and while an ESX server we could actually name the switch anything we wanted we're gonna follow convention and name it v switch 1 using the correct case as well with the capital S we're gonna go ahead and specify jumbo frames right from the outset so that we can move forward with a solid jumbo frame configuration and as the uplink for the virtual switch we're gonna choose VM Nick - as that is the first of the two ten gig Nick's connected to our ice cozy storage network I'm going to go ahead and edit settings on V switch one and I'm going to add the second uplink which is gonna be V on Nick three the second ten gig uplink connected to our I scuzzy storage network and then I want to choose save now that we've created the V switch for I scuzzy storage we're gonna go ahead and add a VM kernel Nick I'll choose add VM kernel Nick we're gonna create a new port group and this is going to be VM VM kernel I scuzzy 0 1 we always create our I scuzzy kernels in order so that we can apply port binding correctly we're gonna make sure to put this on B switch 1 otherwise it won't have any connectivity we don't use a VLAN we use air gap storage and then we're gonna set our MTU for 9000 enabling jumbo frames right out of the gate now we don't have DHCP on our storage network most people are not going to have DHCP on our storage networks we're gonna want to set our IP address right away we have a convention that we use and I'm following that convention and I don't need to select any additional services I scuzzy is enabled by default on VMware VM kernel so I'll go ahead and choose create now I can go ahead and add another VM kernel Nick this will be a Newport group this will be a VM I scuzzy Oh to again on our I scuzzy virtual switch again jumbo frames right out of the gate static IP settings and following convention for my IP addresses our practice is to increment the IP addresses of vmkernel connections by 20 in that way we could have cluster sizes of up to 20 hosts without any overlap now that we've created two VM kernels for I scuzzy storage I want to go to the port groups tab and I want to set the network connections so that we can enable port binding when we configure I scuzzy storage I'm going to choose the lowest numbered of my I scuzzy VM kernels and I'm going to choose edit settings and I'm gonna go to the nic teaming tab and i'm going to override the failover order and what i'm going to do is i am going to take the highest numbered nic and mark it as unused this isn't my rule this is VMware's rule one and only one NIC per I scuzzy VM kernel connection now I'm gonna go to I scuzzy o2 and choose edit settings go to NIC teaming and override the failover order and because this is the higher-numbered I scuzzy colonel I'm gonna leave the higher numbered NIC active and I'm gonna mark the lower numbered NIC unused in this way we've mapped each of our I scuzzy BM Colonels to one and only one network adapter and when we set up storage we will be able to implement port binding let's go to the storage we're gonna go to adapters and we're gonna click on software I scuzzy enable give it a second the first thing that we're going to want to do is add port binding because we've configured the network correctly we'll be able to bind each of our I scuzzy vmkernel connections now port binding is configured now we're going to go ahead and add a dynamic target and we'll choose the address and we'll choose rescan and as soon as the HB a rescan has completed you can see that we have a 300 gig I scuzzy LUN available to us let's go ahead and choose new datastore we're simply going to call this datastore I scuzzy o one will choose the desk we're going to use the entire disk and we're going to create a VMFS six partition and almost instantaneously we have a VMFS partition available to us let's take care of a few more details before we conclude the initial configuration of our ESX server let's go to manage system and advanced settings we're going to search for user VARs and there are a number of ways that we can suppress alarms and warnings which are not advantageous to us I'm a big believer in using SSH proactively as opposed to reactively so I'm going to choose the variable user VARs suppress shell warning choose edit option change this to 1 and select save now that we've suppressed the shell warning we're gonna choose time and date and we're gonna configure NTP for our ESX host I can't emphasize how important it is to setup correct NTP for your ESX host it goes beyond logging and is especially important if you ever plan on using hyper-converged storage or networking I'm gonna make sure that my NTP service start-up policy is set to start and stop with host and then I'm going to go to the NIS T internet time service list and I am going to pick NTP servers by IP adress the reason I'm doing this is because we haven't provisioned DNS in our lab yet even though we've specified these two NTP servers by IP address later after we've configured DNS we'll be able to come back and change them to the pool IP addresses that I prefer one final step you'll notice that NTP is still stopped we need to go to services and choose MTP and then start once NTP has started if we go back to system time and date this does not always update dynamically we may have to refresh the information in order to see that our NTP service is running this concludes our initial configuration of your ESXi 7 server I'd like to thank you for viewing our demonstration today my name is John Borek and I'm the lead Solutions Architect at vm sources cloud and infrastructure you can reach us by phone at two one five seven six four six four four two or email me personally john at vm sources dot-com I'd also like to encourage you to check me out on LinkedIn look at my blog or view some more of our videos on YouTube thanks again for joining us goodbye

Channel: VMsources Cloud & Infrastructure

Views: 46,298

Keywords: VMware, Web Client, ESXi, VMsources, Install, Configure, VM, Virtual, Virtual Machine, iSCSI, Instructional, Best Practices, Datastore

Id: WvEU9WW6H9Y

Length: 16min 32sec (992 seconds)

Published: Tue May 26 2020