I wanted to do a test run of VMware vSphere 6 but only operating as an end-user, and I wanted to do it using vCloud Director (no longer available to end-users, just service providers).
This took some effort but really wasn’t too bad. Trying to do vCenter Server Appliance was a bust, though, as I don’t have direct access to the vCloud Director infrastructure and I really didn’t want to use some of my precious resources within the nested ESXi systems for a management application. So I took the easy way out and just used Windows Server 2012 R2.
This is 1 A/D controller, 1 vCenter, 1 FreeNAS file server, and 3 ESXi hypervisors. Total time to put this together not including the VCSA battles was about 3 hours. The VCSA items was a lot more hours even with the help of my vendor who tried to do a deploy for me and import into my virtual data center (it just didn’t work as expected with weird networking items and unable to change the IP address).
There are 4 networks in place:
| Network | Type | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| miketest-internal | NAT to public | Firewall for management (A/D and vCenter) |
| storage | Internal vApp | ESXi mounts NFS storage — no internet access (ESXi and FreeNAS) |
| intra-vm | Internal vApp | VM-to-VM private communication — no internet access (VMs) |
| external-direct-130 | NAT to public | Firewall for application serving (VMs) |
I installed FreeBSD 10.2-RELEASE and it worked just fine. Did a make buildworld && make installworld for fun and it progressed along quite well, not as fast as doing it without double virtualization and/or directly on my trashcan.
I took some screenshots at the end of my run so the nested VMware infrastructure was shutdown.
vApp Diagram mode
vApp VMs with more detail
And last - configuration of the VMs used for this experiment.
| Host | RAM | vCPU | Storage |
|---|---|---|---|
| ad.vmware.geeks.org | 2 GiB | 1 | 20 GiB |
| esxi{1,2,3}.vmware.geeks.org | 8 GiB | 2 | 20 GiB |
| freenas.vmware.geeks.org | 8 GiB | 2 | 40 GiB boot + 6×200 GiB RAID10 ZFS |
| vc.vmware.geeks.org | 10 GiB | 2 | 120 GiB |
Except for the FreeNAS system the VMs were all configured to use VMXNET3 for networking interfaces.
All systems used the LSI SAS SCSI adapter.