Those lovely people over at Ravello Systems have given all of the current vExperts access to their nested virtualisation offering, so each month I have some free hours to run the equivalent of a homelab, but it’s located somewhere out on AWS or Google, fronted by the clever Ravello interface. This should allow me to test out a whole bunch of things that are difficult to set up on a home lab, so I can keep the on premises stuff for running my production and put my dev / test in the cloud.

Over the last couple of weeks there’s been a lot of talk about products being launched by VMware’s relatively new Cloud-Native Applications division. Now the launch date is here and even though it’s not quite launch time yet, the cat is out of the bag. The products are currently known as; Project Photon - A stripped down Linux version optimised to run on the vSphere hypervisor which is designed solely to host and package containers.

More messing around in my lab and it was time to upgrade SRM from 5.5 to 5.8, including an update of the vCenter itself to 5.5 u2d as well as the IBM SVC SRA as precursors to the SRM upgrade itself. Upgrading vCenter is pretty simple as long as you run a custom installation and step through the components one at a time, SSO first through to vCenter 4th and last.

So, you’ve got a nice new vCenter 6 up and running, maybe you have an external PSC as well? Jolly good! Now what? There’s a whole bunch of additional configuration items that you should look at amending before too long. Log in as your SSO Admin account - administrator@vsphere.local (or whatever you changed it to during the installation) and away we go. Let’s start with something new - the Download Remote Console option.

It was time to replace my old workhorse HP ML115’s with some new kit ready for the vSphere 6 launch and given the amount of commentary around the community at large I decided to take the plunge and source a bunch of Intel NUC devices, namely the D54250WYK model. No point doing things by halves, so I got three* and stuck 16GB memory in each, which should give me enough room to build a decent lab!

Synology have announced their latest beta this week. DSM 5.2 Beta now gives you the abilty to run Docker Containers natively. This will be interesting for a bunch of vExperts, who use these devices. After I get vSphere 6.0 bedded in, I imagine that I will be looking at the option that this presents where I will be able to have a Docker implementation within the vSphere environment and play with the portability options by shifting them in and out of the Synology.

Following directly on from my previous post where I install a PSC, it’s time for a vCenter. There’s not a lot of point having one without the other. The webpage I used to install the PSC is still open so I can just click on Install again and accept the EULA again and it is right back to the connecting to target server options once more. The same options as last time for this.

So at last, vSphere 6 release day. Let’s crack on with this new PSC stuff! vSphere 6.0 splits vCenters into a Platform Services Controller piece (SSO, licensing, Certificates - all the bits that really tie your setup together) and the vCenter installation itself. These can be on the same server (VM, right?) or different servers, creating stand-alone PSC’s which can be load balanced and so on. The vCenter Deployment Guide has been available for a few days already and that is really a step by step guide through the installations that you can do.

After setting up the basics of a Cisco 3550 in the previous blog in this series, it is time to carry out the more advanced setup. Here I’ll step through some of the options that are good to set up if you want to run a vSphere homelab on one of this type of switch. Ideally, you will want one which is L3 capable so routes as well as switches (the 3550 series is one of those oddities that can be L2 only or L3 as well, depending on the age or model).

At this point, I am not going to go in to detail about the installation of SRM 5.x, as there are already lots of good blog posts / series out there about this. SRM 6.x though, fair game! However, I wanted to lay out some of the changes that should be made after an installation of your SRM environment before you start your testing, to give you the best chance of success as possible.