Sunday 26 April 2020

Installing your first VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0 Server


Installing VMware vSphere 7.0 is a fairly straight forward task, in simplistic terms, it involves grabbing hold of the ISO, whether that be from VMware or from the hardware vendor of your servers.

Once the ISO is obtained, mount it, boot your ESXi host hardware and follow the instructions that get presented on the screen.

The installation is really broken down into 4 steps.



Installing ESXi does have some requirements and the Hardware requirements are as follows. Make sure that you have the supported platform and for more information, visit the VMware compatibility guide

vSphere ESXi requires

·         At least two CPU cores
·         The NX/XD bit to be enabled for the CPU in BIOS
·         Requires a minimum of 4 GB of physical RAM, however provide at least 8 GB of RAM to run virtual machines.
·         To support 64-bit VMs enable hardware virtualisation on the host.
·         One of more Gigabit or faster NICs
·         A boot disk of 8 GB for USB or SD devices, if using HDD, SSD, or NVMe, then at least 32 GB of disk space. Also provide space for VMs if storing locally.

Once the ESXi host is installed, the host’s basic configuration will need to be configured, and this will be covered in a later blog.



Friday 17 April 2020

ESXi 7 Evaluation and License mode considerations


I’ve been a keen user of the VMware vSphere and previous versions of their bare metal hypervisor for a number of years now.

When I first get hold of the product, I usually build a test lab, purely so that I can install and play with the product in an environment that I’m not going to break, and if I do, it’s not a business critical system that will bring the company crashing down.

With VMware vSphere 7.0, VMware have allowed the product to be installed and used in full Enterprise Plus mode for 60 days.

As the evaluation is a full edition of Enterprise Plus, you can use all of the features that makes the product the market leading virtualisation platform, these features include vSphere vMotion, vSphere HA, vSphere DRS, etc.

The 60 evaluation starts when you first turn on the ESXi host. At any time during the evaluation period, you can convert the product to a licensed mode from evaluation mode, but the evaluation mode has only decreased by the time it was in evaluation mode.

For example, I install ESXi on 1st April 2020 and convert to Standard license on 7th April 2020, that means I have only used 7 days of my Enterprise Pus evaluation.

Now let’s say that I really need to test vSphere Distributed switches, unfortunately these are not available with Standard edition.


If we set the product back to evaluation mode, we’ll be able to explore the entire feature set for an additional 53 days.




VMware and Pearson VUE now delivering remote exams

If you're worried about how you'll get that VMware exam done that you've been studying for, the here's some good news.

From April 20th 2020 you will be able to sit your exam remotely, for some of us who have had the luxury of being able to sit our Microsoft and AWS exams, this will come as a welcome addition to the number of exams we can now do from the comfort of our own homes and offices.

For more information, please visit Karl Childs of VMware Education post

Regards and stay safe

Bryan

Wednesday 1 April 2020

A great place to access VMware vSphere 7 resources

Hope everyone is doing as well as can be expected.

As you may or may not be aware VMware are soon to announce their latest version of vSphere, that being vSphere 7

There are new features coming.

For a central resource that you can access to find information relating to this new version of vSphere, visit.

VMware vSphere 7 Blogs

Short post, but I hope you find it useful