This is the first post of the series of guides on how to setup a vSphere nested lab in your computer.
One of the key parts, of the nested environment is the vCenter. I could install it on top of a nested ESXi host using the normal procedures, but this brings me to a chicken and egg situation, because what is a benefit for a datacenter running 24×7, having all the availability options applied to my vCenter, is not a good idea for my laptop based nested lab, because I will be turning off all the environment very often. That’s why for this kind of labs, having the vCenter (VCSA) running directly on top of my VMware Workstation is a good idea, but then you need do do some tricks to have it running correctly; you cannot use the regular installer.
First, you need to have the ISO file for the VCSA. I’m using the latest version available at the date of this writing – VMware-VCSA-all-6.7.0-15132721.iso. What I did was mount the iso in my Windows 10 Machine, and then go the VMware Workstation and use Open…
Browse inside the virtual drive. Inside the vcsa directory you will find the actual OVA file…
That will open the Import Virtual Machine dialog, you need to accept the EULA to continue…
Name the virtual machine…
And select the size of the appliance. Here the obvious choice is the Tiny vCenter Server with Embedded PSC, that requiere 2 vCPUs, 10GB of RAM and 300GB of disk (thin provisioned, my VCSA is around 9GB used).
In the properties dialog, you need to configure the Networking Configuration, leave the rest blank (for some reason if you configure the root password in this step, it won’t recognize it later when you turn on the appliance).
After this, the OVA will be imported and the VM will turn on automatically.
You need to wait until the VM fully boots and then you will will be able to set the root password.
With that, you will finish the phase 1 of the deployment. To continue, you need to access the appliance from the browser using https://<IP Address>:5480, and select the Set Up option
From there, you will see that the Stage 1 was completed successfully, that is the Deployment of the appliance that we did manually. Now you can proceed with Stage 2 to finish the set up.
This step will pull the network information already setup from the import phase of the OVA. Something important to consider is that for this step to work, you need the name of the appliance to actually be resolvable using the DNS you are using. This is a pre-requisite for vCenter, so what I have is another Windows Server VM running as Active Directory and DNS server.
Next, you need to setup SSO, I used default vsphere.local domain, and setup the password for administrator account…
Accept if you want to Join CEIP…
And then you are ready to finalize the deployment. Review the information setup and click finish button.
You will get a warning telling you cannot go back from here if you continue…
And then you will get the progress bar of the final setup. This will take a couple of minutes to finish.
And setup will be completed. You now have your VCSA deployed in VMware workstation 🙂
I hope this guide is useful…