AaronDelp.com: Creating a VMware Virtual (Home) Lab for VMware VCP & VCAP

This article is part of my Virtual Lab Series.

In the first part of this series I discussed the over all design of this lab.

In the second part of this series I discussed how I installed ESXi.

In the third part I discuss some of the quirks of VMware HA I encountered.

Step One: Install AD & DNS
Nothing sexy here. I created a w2k3 R2 standard edition virtual machine and then did a dcpromo to make it both my Active Directory and DNS server. My domain is called VIRTUALLAB with a DNS name of virtuallab.local

Step Two: Install ESXi
I covered this in my post on how to install ESXi in Fusion.

Step Three: Configure ESXi
I will only cover this for the first server but I completed the steps for ESXi2 as well.

We first want to configure the network on the ESXi host. Hit F2 from the ESXi splash screen and then choose Configure Network Management:

Select IP Configuration and you will see the following screen. Modify the IP address to static and enter the IP of the host as well as the default gateway (it will always be XXX.XXX.XXX.2 in Fusion):

Return to the previous screen and select DNS Configuration. Enter the DNS Server and the hostname:

Return to the previous screen. I'm not 100% sure if it is needed, but I always add the DNS suffix as well. Better safe than sorry. Choose Custom DNS Suffixes and enter the DNS entry:

Step Four: Prepare the ESXi host & join the Active Directory
Using the VI Client, connect to the ESXi host and point NTP at the AD server. This step is needed to keep Kerberos in sync:

Create a Group an ESX Admins group in Active Directory (it must be EXACTLY like that). Thanks to Maish and Brian for information on this. Create the proper users and populate the group. Once this is complete, insert the ESXi host into the domain: