Vsphere ESX 4 Installation Guide

"ESX4 Pre-installation Considerations"

(1) Considerations about the hardware

First, make sure that the hardware you purchased is in the VMware Compatibility List. This site must be accessed by: http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility

Second, the memory capacity. Since VMware can squeeze every drop of memory or computing power from the hardware, the physical servers tend to move closer to the full formula. However, the cost factor sometimes restricts procurement. For example, when a single 8GB of RAM is 4 times times the price of one 4GB RAM, you may consider purchasing 2 4GB of memory to replace the one 8GB memory. At this time, a server with 16 memory slots would be more appropriate than a server with only 8 memory slots.

Again, the CPU's computational power and clustering. Building a 12-CPU VMware cluster, 6 dual-CPU servers are more efficient than 3 4-CPU servers (you're losing only 2 CPU capacity for the HA feature, not 4 CPUs). Of course, if you're building a virtualized datacenter with 120 CPUs, that's a different story.

After that, the CPU and memory are matched. Now the CPU's computing power is greatly improved, if the CPU is only used to 20%, and memory usage has been to 80%, obviously this is not a good plan. The better result is that both memory and CPU can be used in 60%-70%, when the application continues to increase, you can consider adding a new ESX host.

Again, the local hard drive. Because the application of ESX cluster must be externally stored, so the server local storage is usually just install ESX itself of the operating system, need not much space, generally 72GB of 10Krpm hard disk is enough. (at present, seemingly the smallest is also 146GB?) ）

Card. Must be a gigabit NIC, and the best practice for VMware is recommended as 6 gigabit NICs (1 service console dedicated, 1 ft,2 VM network,2 Storage network).

For a selection of storage networks, refer to other documentation. Is NFS or iSCSI? The selection of storage connections for VMware vsphere has also been partially analyzed and judged.

At this stage (end of 2009 and early 2010) My 6 host applications plan to use dual CPU XEON 5540,64GB memory, dual 146GB SAS hard drive, 8 Gigabit Ethernet HP bl280c G6 Blade server.

(2) about the choice of ESX or ESXi

Because you choose to install the HP SIM agent for hardware health monitoring, you must use the ESX with service console. If there is no third-party tool to install, you can choose ESXi, because this version does not have service Console, theoretically less OS vulnerabilities, need to play less patches, maintenance workload is small, but also can save a part of the CPU and memory resources. I choose ESX also consider the use of Service console more command line and script management, in case the host problems, lack of necessary diagnostic tools.

Because in addition to no service Console,esxi and Esx almost have exactly the same functionality and higher security, better performance, so recently more and more experts recommend users to adopt ESXi. About ESX or esxi choice of further analysis, concrete can also refer to the humble text: "Esx or ESXi?" It's a problem, too.
http://delxu.blog.51cto.com/975660/272098

"ESX4 Pre-Installation"

Clock: It is recommended that ESX use NTP to come to school. So, be sure to have an NTP server address available within your local area network (or, if the ESX can connect to the Internet, use an NTP server address on the Internet, such as 0.us.pool.ntp.org.) In general, however, for security reasons, ESX host is not with the extranet. If there is no NTP service, make sure that the hardware clock is using UTC time (set in BIOS)

Network: Must have at least one network card, and make sure the network cable is plugged in (link up). Of course, this problem does not exist for HP Blade servers.

In order to avoid the installation of the host because of network problems, it is recommended to allocate before the installation of which network port is the corresponding management VLAN, record the MAC address of this network card, and configure the upper end of the switch port and VLAN. If the installation is wrong, see the "Esx Install after Configuration" section to fix this problem.

Partitioning: ESX4 's service console itself is also a virtual machine, running a simplified Linux operating system, where version 4.0 is present in a vmdk file (ESXCONSOLE.VMDK) and must be located on a VMFS partition. (This can be a local hard disk partition, or a bootable San partition). This esxconsole (which is used as the virtual machine for managing ESX) can be used not only to manage ESX with command line or script, but also to install Third-party tools (such as HP SIM agent for hardware health monitoring). Therefore, the default size of 5GB is small and must be manually configured at installation time. (i.e. do not select automatic)

Some experts recommend the establishment of/OPT and/var partitions. I personally suggest a relatively simple approach is that for a 146GB HD, 50GB to the root partition/, which at the same time ensure that/home,/opt and/var will not be insufficient space.

In addition, some of the memory is allocated to esxconsole this virtual machine, the default is about 300MB (depending on the physical memory size slightly different). The Swap partition size defaults to twice times the memory. But Esxconsole because it will run Third-party tools, 300MB of memory is small. It is recommended to adjust to 800MB (maximum), and the corresponding swap partition should be adjusted to 1600MB. This zoning adjustment must be done at the first installation.

So the partitions to be tuned at the time of installation are ultimately like this:

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Mount Point Type Size

/EXT3 50000MB (50GB)

(none) SWAP 1600MB (1.6GB)

/var/log EXT3 2000MB (2GB)

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For more consideration of zoning, refer to the 第23-26 page of "Mastering VMware vsphere 4.0", published by Sybex Scott Lowe. (This book is downloaded from many places on the internet and is the best reference book for Learning vsphere 4.0.) ）

"Installation Steps for ESX4"

After all the preparation is done, the actual installation is actually a very simple process. Concrete installation See humble text: "VMware vsphere ESX 4 Installation Diagram"

It is important to note that the partition configuration is the default and is manually adjusted according to the suggested values described in the previous section. (I change it when I have the time to reload the system)