Installing ESXi

So, after a week marked by the shellshock vulneravility, that kept quite busy for the last few days, I finally had some time to get back to my small lab project.

The TS140 and the memory module arrived right on time, and I had a 750GB old hard drive around that I was not using since quite some time (we will see later why), so I put my hands on job. Getting the components on its place was quite easy, you don't even need to use a screwdriver a single time, so the phisycal part was quick to get done:

Probelms started on the software install, though. I decided to run the esxi on a usb since I read that it was good option, and didn't have much impact on performance. Having a NAS with 4TB I thought it would be nice to have datastores via NFS, but to get it started I planned to go with the 750GB drive. To format a bootable USB drive a found the useful tool rufus, which I used to format a 4GB (using a bigger one seems to be just a waste of resources) USB drive to boot with the ESXi 5.1 image downloaded from the vmware site. I was going to use ESXi 5.5, but as I read about certain problems with firefly perimeter clustering, I decided to go for 5.1 instead.

Right after booting up, first issue: menu.c32: not a COM32R image. Apparently it is quite common and is due to vmware using and old file on the bootable iso they provide. Actually rufus already warned me while formatting the drive, so it was easy to fix.

Second attempt to boot up, second problem: the NIC is not supported. I read about it while looking for a server, but didn't thought it would pop up that soon. Anyway after a bit of research in google I found the tool ESXi customizer. It allows you to create a custom bootable iso image where you can include drivers that do not come in the standard image, or, like in my case, replace the standard one with a custom one found thanks to the user mapd07 in a vmware community post.

After that I thought everything would go smooth, but ther was still another suprise waiting for me. It was taking too long for the installer to boot up, which at first I thought was due to the "cheap server", but when it took so long I changed the tty and saw a cascade of errors related to the hard drive. Apparently it was broken and is not just that it was unable to mount it (it was not that moment, yet), it was unable even to access the device.  So I just powered off the server again, removed the hard drive and went ahead installing the ESXi in the usb itself.

The rest of the install process was quick, and the screen was now showing that I should be able to control the vSphere  through a client in my lan, showing the address of the server, so I went back to my laptop and, indeed, the vSphere was accessible through the vSphere client. It was giving a warning about it being licensed only for trial during 60 days, so I went back to the vmware download site, grabbed my license key and put it back in the ESXi. Now it is limited in capabilities, but not in time:

Later I borrowed a 1TB HD that I'm using for datastore, I'll explain in further posts what I have done so far, including firefly perimeter, junos space and LTM VE. Being a noob didn't help me, and I guess I did all the mistakes that could be done, but so far I have my own ESXi running at home, which is quite cool!

New virtual networking lab!

So, long story short, I wanted to be able to play with devices such as vSwitches, firewalls, F5 LTM, etc, and over the last few years it has become more and more usual to get them as virtual machines.

My skills in virtualization and as a sysadmin are very limited, so I thougt it would also be a good idea to build my own home lab, with an esxi where I'd deploy VMs such as junos frefly, LTM VE, etc. That way hopefully I'll also learn something about virtualization with ESXi.

So far I have already bought a lenovo TS140 from amazon + an 8GB RAM module from alternate. It was not easy to find a memory, mainly because ECC + unbuffered is not cheap at all, so I only got 1 module, and probaly will get another one soon.

The other options I've checked were the HP microSrv Gen8 and the dell PowerEdge T20, but I've chosen the Lenovo mainly beacuse it is easily expandable and I've already found that what I want to achieve seems to be possible

I already have an idea of what the lab should be, and what I would like to have is:

 - vmware ESXi   
 - F5 LTM VE
 - Junos Firefly
 - Junos Space

All this products come as VMs with a trial license which terms I'll have to read carefully, just to be sure.

It should allow me to play with automation, clustering, IRB and other conecpts in a non prod enviroment. Also at some point I would like to change the standard vswitch with some sort of SDN capable vswitch that I can use to practice SDN principles, and depending on demo licensing availiability, maybe even security/IDP.

I'll try to keep a track of what I do step by step, I still can't believe I'll be able to do all this in my own house, with equipment worth less than 500€. Performance might be cr*ppy but it still amazes me that I'll be able to have all this!