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vSphere Deployment

We have a chicken and egg problem. We can't really deploy ADDS until such time as we have a hypervisor to run it on. You could have a physical host with ADDS but let's leverage virtualization to the extent possible. The rough process will be

  • Deploy esxi1
  • Deploy esxi2
  • Create an NFS datastores and Upload ISOs
  • Create an xubuntu management box (virtual)
  • Deploy ADDS and create the RangeControl Domain
  • Provision ADDS with users and groups
  • Install vcenter on esxi1
  • Integrate vcenter with ldaps
  • Create range-user and range-instructor roles
  • Create Storage and Management DSwitches
  • Install RangeControl
  • Start creating courses

esxi on nucs 1 & 2

I'm using vCenter Server 8 and the associated Hypervisor from my VMUG subscription

image-20221118094642647

  • sha1sums check out

    image-20221118095850985

Build your bootable esxi media

ESXi Installation

  • On Both NUCs

    • Boot the host to usb F10and wipe any existing VMFS volumes
    • The NUC has a 1TB nvme SSD
    • The NUC should pick up a non production DHCP address

    image-20221118111342175

  • Note, as of Nov 18, 2022, there is currently no native driver for a USB network interface. Each of the NUCs has a Startek USB to GigE adapter that worked using the community driver. This is not critical for our reference architecture but will get annoying when I want separate links for storage later.

production IP addresses

There are a few ways to set this. I'm going to do it via ssh and esxcli. Turn on console and ssh access within the esxi host client

  • nuc1

    esxcli system hostname set --host=nuc1
    esxcli network ip interface ipv4 get

    esxcli network ip interface ipv4 set -i vmk0 -I 192.168.1.240 -g -g 192.168.1.1 -N 255.255.255.0 -t static

image-20221118115643055

  • nuc2

    esxcli system hostname set --host=nuc2
    esxcli network ip interface ipv4 get

    esxcli network ip interface ipv4 set -i vmk0 -I 192.168.1.241 -g 192.168.1.1 -N 255.255.255.0 -t static

Configure Storage

Configure Storage