Labs 7, 8, 9, and 10

Lab 7

In this lab I had to set up a virtual switch and a port group for each of my ESXi hosts so that the virtual machines on these hosts could connect to the production network. I had already set this up previously, so I'll show my configuration below. 

As you can see, my Windows 7 client on the left has connectivity and can ping my DC. On the right you can see that vSwitch0 has the VM Network on it, and it is connected to vmnic0 which is connected to the production switch.

Lab 8

For this lab I had to access iSCSI storage. I covered iSCSI storage in my screencast so I had already set up or can easily set up everything for this lab. I had set up iSCSI storage on my NetApp vsim already, so all I had to do there was add the two ESXi hosts to the initiator group for my iSCSI LUN.

On the VMware side, I had also already set up all the networking so all I had to do was create and configure the iSCSI adaptors. As shown below I am able to see the 8GB LUN I created. Both ESXi hosts are set up identically.

Lab 9

For this lab I had to manage VMFS datastores. First off I had to rename a VMFS datastore which is a no-brainer, then I had to create and resize various datastores on iSCSI LUNs. The LUNs had not been set up, so I just had to create some LUNs in my iSCSI SVM. Below are the screenshots for the various configurations.

To the left you can see the renamed local datastores and the two datastores I created on iSCSI LUNs. On The right you can see I am resizing a datastore to fill a whole LUN.

Deleting a datastore



In this screenshot you can see that VMFS-3 is deleted, and I am increasing the size of VMFS-2 by using the leftover LUN 3 that was used by the deleted VMFS-3.



In this last screenshot you can see that I created a datastore on a 60GB LUN and it is shared between the 2 hosts.



When I was doing this lab I had a strange issue where LUN size was reported incorrectly in vSphere. This did not resolve even when refreshing for some reason, but it fixed when I took a LUN offline and online again. There was probably something I didn't refresh properly, so I need to be careful next time that I refresh everything properly and give the systems a bit of time to update.

Lab 10

I had actually already added NFS storage through vSphere very early on into the project. The most time consuming part when setting this up was doing the work on the NetApp side. Adding an NFS datastore is very easy on the VMware side if all the underlying networking and storage is set up properly. I remember having issues because the virtual switch for storage was not configured correctly, but otherwise it was very straightforward. 

Here is the summary for the NFS datastore I have configured; as you can see, it uses NFS 3.

It is currently being used to store the 2 VMs I have running on my hosts, so the usage for it is fairly high.