Punching Clouds

I know that running ESX in a virtual machine is not new… that kind of thing has been talked about and done all over the web. But lately several people have asked me how to set that up. I guess now that the new vSphere products are on the market, everyone wants to get the most out of their new features. So, here it is… I’m going to share with everyone how I configure my virtualized test environment of vSphere with VMware Fusion.

First of all you’re going to need a single or multi-processor system with the latest version of Intel or AMD processors (specifically the ones that have support for Intel-VT and AMD-VT) and a good amount ranging from 4 GB and up. In this setup case it is extremely important that you meet or exceed these specs because the more RAM you have, the more ESX/ESXi, vCenter, and Guess (?) VM’s you can have. I’m currently using three different environments for all my testing and work, with the following specs:

Environment One: Portable

• MacBook Pro 17″ Unibody – It has one of the latest version of Intel processors.
• 8 Gigabytes of RAM – Maximum amount of RAM supported by MacBook Pro.
• Two 500 GiG external USB Hard Drives – small drive with lots of spare space.
• VMware Fusion 2.0.4 – VMware’s Mac version of their hosted hypervizor platform.

Environment Two: Not really Portable

• Mac Pro Dual Intel 3.2 GHz Quad-Core (8) – this is the version before they switched to Nahalem.
• 32 Gigabytes of RAM – Maximum amount of RAM supported by that system.
• One Drobo NAS Device  – 4TB of USB accessible storage, and 4TB local. Lots of space for VM’s.
• VMware Fusion 2.04 – VMware’s Mac version of their hosted hypervizor platform.

Environment Two: Not portable at all!

• Six Dell PowerEdge Servers – 2 PowerEdge 6650, 2 PowerEdge T300, 2 PowerEdge 1U
• 72 Gigabytes of RAM – between all of them, each one with 12 gigabytes.
• One Thecus 7700N NAS Device – Configure as iSCSI SAN with 6 TB
• Dell Rack

Ok, maybe I’ve gone a bit over the top with some of this stuff… you don’t need to get as crazy. You just have to meet the processor requirements and have as much memory as you can afford for your laptop or desktop. The process of creating the VMs are very simple but following the correct steps before and after that creation is what makes the magic happen.  When creating the VM start by choosing the “create a custom virtual machine from Fusion” option. For the ESX/ESXi host you have two options to choose from as the based for the guess (?) OS that is going to be installed :

Option 1: Linux – Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 64-bit

Option 2: Other – Other 64-bit

To be honest either choice will work as long as you modify the setting of the VM before you start the build. The pre-configure VM settings are different. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 option will configure the VM with 20 GB of Disk Size and 1 GB of RAM. The other 64-bit option will configure the VM with 8 GB of Disk Size and 256 MB of RAM. Neither one of the default VM settings will work for what you need to do. The ESX/ESXi servers require a minimum of 2 GB of RAM, and none of the options provide that by default. Configure the disk size to be larger than 10 GIG’s, since that capacity is required by the Service Console.  Other than that, I haven’t been able to detect any issues in particular or anything on the ESX/ESXi VM’s based on the option used for the build.  If you’re like me and want to make sure that you have everything labeled with proper names and stuff you can go with the Red Hat option.

After the VM is created, do not power it on until the following changes have been made: Go into the setting of the VM and change the setting from one to two processors; also, increase the memory up to 2  GIG (2048).

Change the Disk Size to 20 GIG (it has to be more than 10 as that is a requirement for the Service Console. I normally use 20. And don’t worry about space because the disk, by default, is created in thin provision format. I would recommend deselecting the “Split into 2GB Files” since deselecting will maintain just one single disk file.

After that, go to the Show All settings view and remove any virtual hardware that its not going to be used like the 3D support, sound, printers, etc. Locate the virtual machines package file and perform the function equivalent of a mouse right click from the keyboard (Control + Click), and select the option that says “Show Package Contents” to display all the VM files including the .vmx file that you need to modify in order to make this work.

A new finder window will open displaying all the files that make up the VM. Select and open the .vmx file with text editor other than Word or Textedit. I use TextMate, and BBEdit on the Mac; try to use something similar for windows if you’re working with a PC. Now that the .vmx file is open and ready  check to see and make sure that the tags and settings listed in the .vmx file match the ones below; if they don’t match, change it to what is listed below:

• config.version = “8″
• virtualHW.version = “7″
• memsize = “2048″
• numvcpus = “2″
• displayName = “Kandinsky” <— this could be whatever you want
• guestOS = “ESX/ESXi”  <— this could be whatever you want

If you would like to add multiple nics to the VM to test isolation, add the following lines right below the last line of the existing ethernet0.linkStatePropagation.enable = “TRUE”. Don’t forget to modify the ethernet# to something that follows like ethernet1, ethernet2, and so on.  If you want the ESX/ESXi Server to be able to identify the nics and be able to use them, they have to be added like this (NOTE: If you add them from the setting  GUI interface, they wont work):

• ethernet0.present = “TRUE”
• ethernet0.virtualDev = “e1000″
• ethernet0.connectionType = “bridged”

At the very bottom of the vmx file add the following lines

• monitor.virtual_exec = “hardware”monitor_control.restrict_backdoor = “TRUE”
• monitor.virtual_mmu = “hardware”
• monitor_control.enable_svm = “true”
• monitor_control.restrict_backdoor = “true”
• vmx.allownested = “true”

Those tags in the vmx file are what makes everything work from the VM’s perspective. These tags is whats will allow you to run a ESX/ESXi in a VM and then turn on nested VM’s and all that good stuff. Here is some additional advice: every ESX/ESXi server has a minimum memory requirement of 2 GIGs. For those of you who have to work with limited amounts of RAM (4GIGs) this could be a big issue because you will only be able to have two ESX Server, which leaves you with no room for vCenter and nested VMs that could be used to test and prep.  Well, I got something for that: since we can now actually change the settings for the require memory for each VM this leaves more memory available for other VMs.  Earlier this month Duncan Epping, the James Bond of VMware virtualization (whose VCDX ID number is coincidentally 007) wrote a post in his blog Yellow-Bricks that described how to lower the amount of required RAM on the vSphere ESX/ESXi VM’s. The post was titled “Running vSphere within Workstation takes up a lot of memory”. Combining the information from this post with Duncan’s you should be able to get a pretty sweet lab for your vSphere testing on either VMware Fusion or VMware Workstation. Enjoy!