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 demonstrates how you can upload the components of Microsoft’s sysprep utility to your Virtual Center server and then use it for fast, automated virtual machine provisioning.

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: