All your applications, data and services in one place. Accessible from any device, anywhere
Everything I am about to demonstrate to you here is free. You won’t have to spend a penny on software to build this architecture, the end result here is a centralised storage system that can be used for iSCSI or NAS storage hosting to all your ESX clients to enable the use of VMotion, HA and DRS services.
VMware ESXi is free and can be downloaded here. Openfiler NAS/iSCSI appliance is free and can be downloaded here
Let us begin.
First of all, we will build or iSCSI or NAS device using ‘Openfiler’. You can download Openfiler from the link above, it is an easy installation (very similar to VMware ESX actually). Here are the required steps to get Openfiler up and running:
This article describes how to change the service console IP address, gateway address and hostname on your ESX Server 3.x host. These settings can be changed using the Virtual Infrastructure Client or from the physical or a remote console connection (ILO, RSA, DRAC, etc)
Once you have installed Virtual Center and set up your first virtual machine from your standard build documentation, you may want to use this new virtual machine as a template or clone to create many others.
Virtual Center supports the cloning of virtual machines and can also prepare the virtual machine for cloning by using Microsoft’s sysprep utility.
Here is how it is done:
The following procedure assumes that you have 2 ESX servers built already or have the ability to do so, and that Virtual Center is up and ready.Setting up a Windows 2003 Server as a software iSCSI target. First, you will need the iSCSI components which comes with ‘Windows Unified Storage Server’ embedded OS.
By default, Virtual Center only displays a limited amount of performance data within its statistics section. This is how you change it do display much more.
A command I always forget..