the worlds gone mad

A recent project I was working on involved the need to join a new office to our existing Data Centres and OSPF core using a Gig circuit over the Internet. To flesh out this idea and test its viability I thought I would try and solve an ESX capacity problem I have at home by moving vCentre into the cloud.

The VM hardware version designates the virtual hardware functions supported by a virtual machine, which relates to the hardware on the host server. A VMware product will not be able to power on a VM with a hardware version higher than what it supports.

Due to close scare in my lab I decided to switch the datastore from a single onboard hdd to iSCSI. I use a WD MyCloud EX2 Ultra but there are a lot of more advanced NAS out there with a whole host of extra features. The WD is rather basic but is sufficient for my needs of partitioning it into a backup drive and an iSCSI drive. Since moving onto this I haven’t noticed any real performance degradation in my lab, its run over 1 Gig port.

Useful commands for managing VMs and vSwitches from ESX console. If the command has been executed successfully there will be no output returned to screen (no output = success!!!).

Intel NUCs only come with 1 built in NIC so when using them as ESX hosts it is useful to add additional USB ethernet adaptors. Before these will be recognised by the ESX OS the drivers need to be installed using a VIB file.

A cisco vswitch that can be used instead of the default VMware DvS to have a similar environment to that of Cisco physical NXOS switches. The control and packet communication can either be carried over VLANs in Layer2 mode or IP addresses in Layer3 mode. The default and Cisco recommended solution is L3 mode.