Labs 1, 2, 3, & 4

Lab 1-2

These first 2 labs involved installing ESXi (VMware's bare-metal hypervisor solution) on a machine and configuring it. This is a very simple process that only takes a few minutes of work. I won't go into much detail for these labs because there is not much to talk about.

Here is the screens after booting and configuring the management network for one of my ESXi hosts.

DCUI IPv4 config:

DCUI DNS config:

Accessing the web management interface:

Lab 3

In this lab I had to create a VM in each ESXi host which is also a very simple process. I have done this many times already so there were no major issues with the general creating of the VM.

I did have some issues relating to the way our lab environment is set up. The first was how to get a Windows ISO into my virtual datastore. The way I solved this problem involved using a feature of VMware Workstation that allows you to attach USB devices on my laptop to the VM I have open.
I copied an ISO onto a USB stick, then attached it to my Virtual Win10 client, then I uploaded the ISO to the datastore from there.

Another strange issue I had was with mouse input. Controlling the VM inside another VM meant that I couldn't move the mouse for some reason. The way I got around that was by doing the Windows setup with the keyboard, then I mounted VMware tools and ran the setup with keyboard only too. I also installed VMware Workstation on my layer one Windows 10 client to manage my layer two VMs. With VMware tools installed and using workstation, the mouse input worked perfectly.

Apart from these issues, there was just little things such as sourcing files that were not provided such as the artificial load generator, because I was using a self created environment rather than a provided lab environment.


Settings for a new VM:

A created VM with VMware Tools installed, network set to Work, and updates turned off (The time is not synchronized in this screenshot, that was fixed):

Lab 4

For this lab I had to deploy and configure a vCenter Server. This was an interesting task because I believe most of the class deployed the VCS that ran on windows whereas I deployed the VCSA OVA template. Apart from the initial install, I didn't have many problems with this lab.

The first task covered installing the VCSA. I did this in a roundabout way. First, I installed a virtual MS Server 2016 machine, then a virtual ESXi host on my personal computer. I then deployed the VCSA from the Server 2016 machine. After this, I had to save my fully installed VCSA as a template and upload it to Talos. Doing this gave me a properly working VCSA on my environment on Talos. Deploying the OVA straight onto the Talos environment seemed to have issues and the install would keep failing which is why I had to do my install this roundabout way.

Here's the settings for my install:


And the working web interface of the freshly installed VCSA running on Talos:
 

Next I had to sort out the licensing, so I used the licences provided by Mark to license my ESXi hosts and my VCSA.

After that I set the password policy so my password would not expire, then I created a datacenter and added my hosts. 

Here's the screenshot from when I was adding the first host

After the hosts were added and NTP was all configured, I had to backup the VCSA onto an FTP server. The lab assumes that the FTP server is already set up on my Server 2016 DC, but since I set up my network from scratch I had to configure it myself. I had to add the IIS role to the DC and configure it. I spent a bit too much time on this because the firewall was blocking the server. I temporarily disabled the firewall and it worked, so I'll add a new rule to allow FTP to work properly so I can have the firewall enabled.

With FTP working, I successfully did the backup and managed to finish up the rest of the lab easily. I had already finished the appliance deployment by the time I got to task 6, so all I needed to do there was set the NTP server for the VCSA and I was finished.

Configured FTP server:

Backing up: