You will find a full video tutorial on how to install nested ESX on my YouTube channel, or you can follow the step by step instructions below.

We will first start by creating a new virtual machine

Select the Create a new virtual machine

Click Next

Give a name for the VM, in my case as this is going to an ESXi 7 I have given esx-03.agiileops.co.uk. Select the DataCenter and

Click Next

Select the computer cluster and host if required.

Click Next

Select the Datastore or storage,

Click Next

Select the compatible

Click Next

Select the Guest OS Family Other

Guest OS Version VMware ESXi7 or later. If you wish to install old version of ESXi server select the appropriate options as given below,

Now this is the most important step for Nested Installation of ESX

Note Expand CPU and on the Hardware virtualization tick the option Expose hardware assisted virtualization to the guest OS.

Then Expand New Hard disk,

Edit the New Hard disk select Disk Provisioning to Thin Provision

Click Next

Click Finish

Now you can open VMRC and start the ESXi Installation after mounting the ISO.

What is DRS?

VMware vSphere® Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) is the resource scheduling and load balancing solution for vSphere. DRS works on a cluster of ESXi hosts and provides resource management capabilities like load balancing and virtual machine (VM) placement.

Benefits of DRS?

VMware runs its own algorithm in the background to balance the Cluster resource, primarily matrix that is taken into account are CPU and Memory utilization on the ESXi host.

However, from the version 6.7 VMware is now going to DRS based on network utilization too this is a feature of DRS.

How to enable DRS?

To enable DRS we need to right-click cluster and edit settings and select DRS

You can set the DRS automation level in the client from Cluster > Manage > Settings > Edit Cluster Settings

How to configure DRS Options.

We have 3 types of options once we enabled DRS.

Manual

VMware will not do any automatic DRS it will be down to VMware Administrator to make that decision after checking the host resources. You must apply both initial placement and load balancing recommendations

Partially automated

VMware will recommend, some DRS and the VMware admin can then accept them which will be applied. DRS applies recommendations only for initial placement ( usually, when power on a VM VMware can suggest to move it to a host which is underutilized. )

Fully automated

In fully automated we have 5 options from 1 which is conservative to 5 aggressive. DRS applies both initial placements and load-balancing recommendations automatically.

Just below once we select our cluster to be Fully automated we will find this amazing slider bar which lets you control the movement of your VM’s from conservative to aggressive as shown below.

1 DRS will only apply recommendations that must be taken to satisfy cluster constraints like affinity rules and host maintenance. DRS will not try to correct host imbalance at this threshold.

2 DRS only provides recommendations when workloads are extremely imbalanced or virtual machine demand is not being satisfied with the current host.

3 DRS provides recommendations when workloads are moderately imbalanced. This threshold is suggested for environments with stable workloads. (Default)

4 DRS provides recommendations when workloads are fairly imbalanced. This threshold is suggested for environments with bursty workloads.

5 DRS provides recommendations when workloads are even slightly imbalanced and marginal improvement may be realized. For dynamic workloads, this may generate frequent vMotion recommendations.

Predictive DRS:

With a simple click to enable predictive DRS, you can now allow VMware to act upon predictive hardware failures. The ESXi host will be put on maintenance mode which will avoid hos failure situation and outage to you very loved production or development servers.

VM Overrides:

In some cases, you might require DRS to treat some VMs as special. For example, you might decide DRS should not consider a specific VM when generating its recommendations, or you might decide DRS should not migrate that VM at all. So for these special VM you can set VM Overrides.

You can set VM overrides under Cluster > Manage > Settings > VM Overrides,

as shown below you can set the automation or migration threshold for a VM to a value different than that at the cluster level, or even disable them.

Options available are Disable, Manual, Partially Automated and Fully Automated.

I hope you enjoy reading this post, you can find a quick video on how to configure in this video below:

References: httpss://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/techpaper/vsphere6-drs-perf.pdf

Leave a comment with your response.

Don’t forget to #subscribe Enjoy watching and keep #sharing!

YouTube Videos

Hi All, I just decided to collect all the Sessions on one blog post so that it’s easy for you to go through. We have almost done 40 % of the content which I wanted to deliver. So if you have been following my blog and YouTube Channel well done.

I also would like to thank my subscribers I get motivated by seeing the numbers grow

Also, I would like to remind those who have not subscribed please do so. I publish 2 videos every week and be sure to hit the notification bell so you don’t miss on new content.

So let’s get started shall we, VMware have announced on 5th Feb 2019 that they are no longer going to have a re-certification requirement which was previously for 2 years. more info on this can be found on my previous post.

Certification Path

1. VMware Tutorial for Beginners

2. VMware Tutorial for Beginners what is Virtualization?

Hey All in this video I will take you through some basics of virtualization, starting from some introduction to types of hypervisors.

What is #Virtualization?

Overview #Type1 and# Type2 Type1 #Bare Metal Virtualization

installing the virtualization software VMM on a physical server ie. ESXi

Type 2 #Hosted Virtualization ( installing Virtualization emulator on the host OS like Windows 7, WIndows 10 eg. VMware player, VMware work station, Oracle virtual box.

Further, we can classify the virtualization in three important categories

3. VMware Tutorial for Beginners, what is cloud?

Type 1 and Type 2 hypervisor

Runs directly on the bare metal ( No host OS) Direct access to CPU and Memory resources

We get Better performance, Server consolidation

Servers are used more efficiently value for money Saves on carbon footprint electricity and AC cooling cost. and Easy to manage.

Different types of Service Model

IaaS, PaaS and SaaS

Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service and Software as a Service

Examples Infrastructure as a Service Google cloud, Amazon Web Services, Azure, Rack Space.

Platform as a Service Google app engine, bring your data and application Software as a Service Email, Dropbox, Skype, Whatsapp, Google apps Microsoft Office 365.

4. VMware Tutorial for Beginners | Session 3: installing vSphere 6.7

Session 3 How to connect ESXi to vCenter

1. Download the vSphere Hypervisor from www.vmware.com

2. For the purpose of Demo Install nested ESX ( on Virtual Machine) 3. Configure IPaddress and basic Networks

4. How to connect to the ESX server using a web-client How to add vSphere ESX server to a vCenter

5. VMware tutorial beginners Session 4 vCenter Server

6. VMware tutorial beginners Session 4 vCenter Server Installation

In this video we are going to go through the fundamentals of vCenter Server understand the concept of what is PSC its function. Then we are going to download and install the vCenter Server.

Once successfully deployed, we will connect to it and add a ESXi Host.

Agenda:

PSC ( Platform Services Controler) vCenter with embeded PSC vCetner with external PSC Session

Download vCenter from www.vmware.com Session 4 Learn how to install VMware vCenter Server 6.7 PSC (Platform Services controller) was introduced with vCenter 6.0

The Platform Services controller is responsible for the following infrastructure security functions vCenter Single Sign-On, licensing, Certificate management, etc.

Deployment Type Tiny (up to 10 hosts, 100 VMs) – 2 CPUs, 10 GB RAM. Small (up to 100 hosts, 1000 VMs) – 4 CPUs, 16 GB RAM. Medium (up to 400 hosts, 4000 VMs) – 8 CPUs, 24 GB RAM. Large (up to 1000 hosts, 10,000 VMs) – 16 CPUs, 32 GB RAM. X-Large (up to 2000 hosts, 35,000 VMs) – 24 CPUs, 48 GB RAM – new to v6.5. Installation options Install – for a new fresh installation Upgrade – (6.0 or 6.5 to 6.7) Migrate – (Windows) Restore – corrupt vCenter

7. VMware Tutorial for Beginners Session 5 Create a Virtual Machine

8. VMware Tutorial for Beginners | Session 6: Deploying an OVF/OVA UCS Manager Platform Emulator

9. VMware Tutorial for Beginners | Session 7: Introducing the HTML 5 Client

10. VMware Tutorial Beginners | Session 8 : What is a Template ?

11. VMware Tutorial Beginners | Session 9 : What is a Clone

12. VMware Tutorial for Beginners | Session 10 Working with VMware Snapshots demo Linux password reset

13. VMware tutorial beginners Session 11 VMware Settings vCPU Memory and Disk

14. VMware Tutorial Beginners | Session 12 VMware Memory Management

15. VMware Tutorial Beginners  | Session 13 VMware Tools Installation

In this session, we are going to discuss VMware Tools. What is Vmware Tools (VMTools) Benefits of VMTools How to check if we are running the up to date version

How to Install VMTools

What is VMware Tools is a suite of utilities that enhances the performance of the virtual machine’s guest operating system and improves management of the virtual machine.

You can use the Windows Easy Install Linux Easy Install feature to install

Upcoming Sessions:

I am planning to deliver another 16 sessions that will cover the following content

Advance features of Hot Add CPU and Hot plug Memory.

Datastore and Shared Storage

VMFS 5 and VMFS 6 ( No migration tool to upgrade)

Advance Troubleshooting Performance monitoring CPU, RAM, Network and disk, also look at Task, Alerts, Events.

Networking Standard vSwitch

Networking Distributed vSwitch

Traffic – Management Traffic, vMotion and Fault-Tolerant, VM-Traffic(production).

Migration using vMotion (Compute) and Storage vMotion (storage) (live demo)

Cluster Configuration, High Availability (HA), Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), EVC Mode (live demo)

VMware Security and Compliance.

VMware Update Manager -Maintenance Patching the ESX host.

VMDS –(VMware Download server for downloading patches via proxy for restricted environments with firewall)

Introduction to Advance troubleshooting using vROPs

Getting started with PowerCLI

Create My learn account

Resources VMware HOL

This will help beginners to understand the concept of VMware Technology and most importantly the terminology. Quite a few of the people who are interested are from different backgrounds and in entry-level, IT positions so they are keen to learn and ask me a question. As of today, I have got nearly 350 subscribers on my YouTube Channel. httpss://www.youtube.com/user/miquraishi

Hi All,

In this post i am going to take you through the steps in installing and configuring the ESX host once the installation is completed I will show you how to add it to the vCenter Server.

for the purpose of the post i have done a nested ESX installation ( which is ESX running on a VM) below you will see a quick YouTube video on the installation. dont for get to subscribe to my YouTube channel as stay tuned for new videos.

I have also taken screenshots on for the installation process. I know sometime its quick to follow the screenshots as appose to going through the video.

At this point the installation starts and you will the progress of the installation.

Thats all you can now press F2 to login to the esx using the password you have set.

You will need to setup the Network configuration to static then add it to the vCenter. If you dont have a vCenter you can deploy one on this ESX server as this is the first one.

I will be posting about how to installing vCetner server in the coming days. however if you have got a vCetner installed this is how you can quickly add the new build host to the vCenter Server.

Login to the vCenter and right click on the Cluster or the datacenter then click on Add Host

After a few seconds you will see the vSphere ESX host appering in the cluster. you can put it on Maintenance Mode if you want to do further configuration on the Host.

Hope you enjoyed by post feel free to command and let me know if you have any questions. I will love to hear back from my users.

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