VMWare Lab Part 1 - Installing ESXI on 2 Dell R710 Servers

well greetings people of the internet hunky joe here on key joe's playhouse today i've got another exciting video for you we're starting a new lab series hmm what could it be what could it be so yes i'm doing a new lab series uh i still have windows lab going on we haven't given up on it we're just still doing it baby steps folks we have our synology lab series of videos which i've got another video coming out perhaps this week maybe next week we'll see uh and so now i've decided i want to play with vmware again so what this is going to be is the vmware lab so we're going to have a windows lab vmware lab we're going to have synology in our lab and we're going to show how we tie all this stuff together now the next question that needs to be answered is what version of vmware are you going to use so i'm going to be using esxi version 6.7 and the reason i'm going to be using it is because i'm putting it on my two dell r710 servers i have a high powered dell r710 with two and a half inch drives and then 5670x 5670 xeon processors two of those with i think uh 32 mega ram and one of those the other one has some low end 50s l low power 5640 processors with 96 gig of ram and i i'm going with esxi 6.7 because it's the last version supported on those old servers with those old cpus now i could have gone with pro prox box i could have gone with xcpng but i've done xcp before i wanted to look into proxmox and i did but unfortunately proxmox the newest version doesn't support some of the older melanox cards i have in those dells so i would lose their functionality the other thing the other problem with proxmox is i'm not a big fan of the interface i'll just tell you that right now um and you know i'm a gooey guy but under proxmox you've got to do a lot of stuff when you want to pass through devices you've got to do a lot of stuff at the command line and i'm just not interested in going jumping through those hoops so the beauty of esxi is with the version i'm running is you can just toggle pass through devices and then reboot the server and you're good to go so ease of use is one of the reasons i want to do it okay so here we go so what i'm doing is i'm coming into a remote desktop of a windows 7 virtual machine so that i can run uh the idrac controller all right so uh first thing i want to do is connect up my virtual media so that's what i'm going to do here and i'm going to add an image which is all the way up in the root on this c drive with one too far iso and there should be an update 3 for dell right there so we're going to open that and then we're going to map that all right and then we'll come back here and we'll power on this system now we're also going to need to press the f11 key to go into the bios boot manager now all the controllers in these dell r710s are now pass-through controllers both in the two and a half inch and the three and a half inch unit that we'll be doing as well so yeah these are two point nine three gigahertz six core processors so so it's gonna be off virtual cd that it boots off of there we go all right so a few minutes later and uh finally we've booted so i'm going to press enter to continue and i'm going to do f11 to accept and continue now this might get a little uh sketchy here because we got a lot of hard drives in here we've got eight spinning hard drives and one ssd so we've got to be careful where we select our drive that we want to install this to so i'm going to go through all of these and hopefully there it is there's the kingston 200 and uh 56 gig hard drive so that's what i'm going to install it onto so i've highlighted it i'm going to hit the enter key and it's warning me there's existing data on it so make sure you've got a backup if that's the case with you and then we'll give it a root password super secret password hit enter and it's gonna warn us that the cpus in the future may not be supported and then we're going to give it f11 and give it authorization to install and uh yeah we'll let that we'll let that install all right so our install has completed so we're going to hit enter to reboot all right so now we're booting off the internal ssd and hopefully it will come up here and then we will have an opportunity to go out and change the ip address on it i'm not going to we're also going to disable ipv6 i have no use for it so i'm going to do f2 to customize and then i'm going to enter my super secret password hit enter oh didn't like it okay oh probably because the caps lock was on pay close attention don't be like hunky joe don't leave the caps lock on all right so now we're going to configure the management network and we're going to go to ipv6 and we're going to turn that off and then we're going to go to ipv4 and we're going to set a static ip and that one is going to be 192.168.5.10 and it's already got my gateway and my subnet mask so we'll accept those and hit enter uh the dns configuration we need to give it a host name uh so i'm going to use the following address and hostname and i'm going to call it e s x i let's do it in caps e s x i dash del 7 10 h and then we'll hit enter and it should have already filled in uh angiejoesplayhouse.local and it has so we'll hit escape apply the changes and reboot the host yes and then it should restart all right so we've rebooted and uh esxi is coming back up and hopefully once it boots up here we'll have an ip address of 5.10 and then what i need to do is go ahead and log in to esxi and i need to go out and i want to pass through the hard drive controller to the physical machine i don't want esxi controlling i don't want to be able to pass that through that controller through in a virtual machine to whatever virtual machine or operating system i decide to go with so what i need to do is come into 5.10 here and log in all right so we'll log in as root with our super secret password all right so there we go it's up so now what i need to do is come over here to manage and then go to hardware and then we'll uh we'll look for a piece yet it's not the fastest in the world is it so i could in theory pass through the melanox connectx adapter as well i could pass through one of these network uh gigabit network controllers i've got the h 200 integrated controller and that's what i want to pass through so i'm going to click on there and i need to toggle pass through okay and then i need to reboot the host come on time and date here we go finally so i'm going to go to edit settings and i'm going to use the network time protocol i'm going to stop and start with the host and then i'm just going to type in pool dot ntp.org so it'll it'll pick a time server to sync with and let's uh go to services ntp damon go ahead and start it come back to system nice interface is slow and let's refresh there we go 1012 utc okay great it's perfect all right so let's come back up here to host and we can reboot it let's go ahead and reboot it alright so now it's time to do the same thing over on the dell r710 with the three and a half inch drives so i'm going to enter the bios boot manager as you can see over here i've got that image mounted again as a virtual dvd drive so we'll just wait for the bios to boot up so same deal here it brings up the bios boot menu and we're going to boot off the virtual cd i hope so we're going to hit enter hit enter again and enter again and good so now we're booting so now i'll get esxi installed on this unit you don't need to see me do that again all right so let's get this one configured now as you can see it's at 5.50 i went ahead and pulled the trigger on those two 5670 cpus i found a good deal for two of them on ebay uh shipped directly to my door for about 30 bucks so the cpus were 17 or 18 and the shipping was like 8 bucks and i found them here in texas so they'll be here shortly and then we can do a we can do a video on that but for now i'm going to log into this unit and get the ip address in there but for now i want to give it a hard-coded ip or static ip so let's do that 192.168.5.7 everything else looks good we want to turn ipv6 off okay and again we're going to call this c e s x i dash dell dash 710 adele 710 dash and the dns suffix should be correct it let's see yes you jp.local so and go ahead and save this and reboot and then once it reboots then we can do the pass through on the sas controller so let's get logged into this vmware server now and see if we can't pass through the controller on here as well okay so the server is up so let's go over to manage let's get our let's set our time and date first come down here to time and date web interface is a little sluggish okay edit settings so we're going to use network time and we're going to start and stop it with the host and we're going to pool on ntp.org is going to be our ntp server and then we're going to go over here to services and we're going to start it okay it's running now so let's come back to system let's refresh and now it's getting our time and date so that's good so then let's go over here to hardware and we want to select the lsi dell six gigabit per second sas hba adapter and we want to pass that through we're just going to use the lsi logic and i'm going to come here to host now i'm going to go ahead and shut down this host because i want to do a cold startup so i'm just going to tell it here to shut down we have the dell r710 the low powered unit with the l5640 cpus and then we have the dell 710 the high powered one with dual x 5670 cpus and so the plan is is to replace these 5640s with two of these 5670s the i ordered them off ebay the other day they're due here they may be in the mail for all i know who knows but the next step is to get these uh esxi units uh connected up to shared storage so that's my nest next task so that's going to be the flash station that these connect to and i have an nfs share over here let's see let's go under shared oh nfs lab esxi so there it is and here's the path so first thing i'm going to do the low powered one i'm going to add a data store i'm going to mount an nfs the name is going to be fs 1018 and the ip is 192 1685 and the share is forward slash volume one forward slash volume one forward slash nfs lab hyphen esxi nfs lab hyphen e s x i right which is go verify nfs lab dash hyphen dash exi next finish and was denied so let's make sure this is 5.7 no it isn't we need to edit change that to 5.7 save save and then let's try it again mount and this is the fs sorry hit the wrong keys fs 1018 at 5.17 and it's forward slash volume volume one forward slash nfs lab hyphen e s x i think is the correct one next finish i should be able to here we go i can browse it good okay so that worked uh so we can ignore this error message now we need to make sure 10 is on the approved list so we'll come back here to synology and make sure there's there's 10 so 10 can connect as well here we go nfs permissions okay so let's go here to storage mount it's going to be fs 1018 on 5.17 forward slash volume one forward slash nfs lab hyphen esxi next finish bang and there's our data store good good good good so now from both of these units we have shared storage set up and we should see 5.7 connected via nfs and then there's 5.11 5.10 so and like i've said before i just really like the way that esxi handles the pass-through of devices now i've chosen two servers because it's going to be a lab environment and i want to be able to experiment with things like vmotion that kind of thing and show you how it works when you have multiple servers we'll also be putting uh vcenter on there as well and i'll do a video on that taking you through soup to nuts and and even getting it configured i'm also using synology shared storage as you saw when i did the video and that's the benefit of having those synologies around i've got that fs1018 it's got really fast well really fast comparatively speaking to spinning rust so i think that's the best way to go i'm not worried about one of the benefits of proxmox was you could run like zfs as your file system as well as running proxmox as your hypervisor but i i you know the i'm just not a big fan of that interface so maybe in a few years or in a few months if they improve it we'll look at it again and and i want the pass-through of hardware to be as simple as possible i don't want to have to the problem is i'm so fearful of putting in the wrong command in the command line and hosing a server i've done that before so this will give us the capability moving forward of loading all kinds of different operating systems on these vmware house and playing around with it and migrating machines and that kind of thing and maybe we'll all learn something together along the way that's my hope anyway well there you go we hope you found the video entertaining and informative as always please give us a thumbs up down below if you liked the video leave your comments down in the comment section subscribe if you're not already a subscriber and click that notification bell to be notified of new videos when they come out please come back and see us again check out our discord check out our uh if you want access to our minecraft server let me know on kijoes playhouse gmail.com patreon paypal youtube join function you know the routine and please don't forget see all of you on the other side [Music] you

Channel: Unkyjoe's Playhouse

Views: 643

Keywords: vmware, esxi, dell, esxi 6.7, dell r710, home lab, homelab, unkyjoes playhouse, virtualization, shared storage, synology nfs setup, nfs share, nfs vmware

Id: ffHDYZS-nTc

Length: 23min 39sec (1419 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 29 2021