Setting up ESXI Server

RAM	36GB
Operating System	VMware ESXi Standard 5.5.0 (Build 1331820)

Storage Configuration (store VMs in local-vms datastore)

Volume 1: RAID 1 config with 2 physical drives – approx. 270GB usable for the hypervisor OS (VMware) and other files. This is called local-isos in the VMware console. This is where VMware is installed to along with spare storage, I typically store operating system ISO images in this datastore. I would not recommend installing/running Virtual Machine files in this datastore as they will not perform well from this location.

Volume 2: RAID10 config with 12 physical drives – approx. 1.6TB of usable space for virtual machines images. This is called local-vms in the VMware console. This is where virtual machine files should be stored. This is a high performing storage area as the read/writes will be spread over a large number of physical drives.

2 hot spares are also assigned on the server.

There is also a separate Shared Storage Array attached to the server with around 2TB of usable space. This could also be used for storing VMs if needed but I would tend to store them on the local storage first (as it has more spindles/physical drives and will probably be faster). This is called san1 in the VMware console.

Network Configuration

This server is configured in the build room subnet (x.x.x.x/24). This subnet is routable with the production network. This shows up as PROD-x.x.x in the VMware console. Virtual machines configured in this network will get x.x.x.x IP addresses from DHCP.

There is also a virtual switch created called HOST-ONLY. This has no network uplinks. Virtual machines assigned to this network will be able to communicate with each other but not be seen by the production network. This is good for isolated labs/virtual machines that you don’t want advertising or to be connected to from the production network. You will need to configure your own IP addressing for virtual machines on this network.

Management

The environment can be managed using the VMware VSphere Client 5.5.0.