Building the Ultimate vSphere Lab – Part 3: VMware Workstation 8
Once we have our desktop installed with Windows 7 x64, it’s time to install VMware Workstation 8.
Download the latest binaries from VMware website and start the setup:
Pick a Typical installation.
The default installation location is fine as it is.
I recommend to check for product updates on each startup.
If you’re in a generous mood and willing to help VMware, tick the check box 
Continue the installation finish it.
When the installation is finished, start VMware Workstation with Administrative Privileges (Right-click and select Run as administrator).
Click Help – Enter License Key… to unlock VMware Workstation.
Let’s start by Configuring VMware Workstation by opening Edit – Preferences…
The first option we will change is the Default location for Virtual Machines.
Create a Folder “VM” on your SSD drive and on the HDD drive. The default location will point to the HDD drive. This way, all VMs are placed on HDD (where we have plenty of space) and only our ‘precious’ VMs will be placed on SSD manually.
My HDD is E: and my SSD is C: (I only have 1 80GB SSD which has my OS installed as well. This leaves me about 25 GB free for VMs on the SSD).
Next click the Updates item in the inventory window and click the Download All Components Now button. This will download all VMware Tools versions. This can be skipped but VMware Workstation will prompt you to download this on the first OS installation of each type. As i find that quite annoying, I prefer to download them all at once in advance.
Next, click the Memory item. Change the memory slider until you have a little bit more that 2 GB left for the OS. (my Windows 7 with the default things running like AV consumes 2.04 GB). If your OS has not enough RAM available, it will start swapping and performance degrades. (putting you SWAP file on the SSD will partially boost performance but still, not an ideal solution).
Click OK to save the preferences.
Now it’s time to set up our Virtual Networking environment. Open the Virtual Network Editor.
Basically, you have three options for a network:
- Bridged: The VM will get an IP analog to your desktop PC. Required if the VM need internet access or access to other devices in your home network (NAS, …)
- NAT: VMware Workstation will act as a router. Not really needed for our setup.
- Host-only: Compare this to an Internal switch on vSphere. VMs can communicate with each other, but not to the outside world.
Some networks are created by default.
The default VMnet0 network will be used temporary to set up the first VMs so we’ll need that.
Next, we’ll create a new Internal network for our LAN communication (vSphere hosts, vCenter, SQL, …). Hit the Add Network… button to create one:
Pick VMnet2
The network must be Host-Only. Deselect the options Connect a host virtual adapter to this network and Use local DHCP service to distribute IP address to VMs.
Change the Subnet IP to 10.0.0.0 with a subnet mask of 255.0.0.0. This will give us quite some IPs to play with.
We will create additional iSCSI/NFS network later on, but this will do for now.
So this will give us two Virtual Networks to use: VMnet0 (with Internet connectivity) and VMnet2 (Internal network only).
Click OK to save these settings.
That’s it for this post! Next, we will start creating our Infrastructure VMs (DC, SQL, vCenter, …)
Building the Ultimate vSphere Lab – Part 1: The Story
Building the Ultimate vSphere Lab – Part 2: The Hardware
Building the Ultimate vSphere Lab – Part 3: VMware Workstation 8
Building the Ultimate vSphere Lab – Part 4: Base Template
Building the Ultimate vSphere Lab – Part 5: Prepare the Template
Building the Ultimate vSphere Lab – Part 6: Domain Controller
Building the Ultimate vSphere Lab – Part 7: SQL Server
Building the Ultimate vSphere Lab – Part 8: vCenter
Building the Ultimate vSphere Lab – Part 9: ESXi
Building the Ultimate vSphere Lab – Part 10: Storage
Building the Ultimate vSphere Lab – Part 11: vMotion & Fault Tolerance
Building the Ultimate vSphere Lab – Part 12: Finalizing the Lab
man I thought I was smart buying up servers to play with at home. I really like this setup much better. anyone interested in some dl360′s
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Yep for sure. I run my ESXi on Dell D620 laptop and everything works just fine. And in home use it’s more than enough, silent and small.
Hallo,
For VMnet2, what’s the point of deselecting the option ‘Connect a host virtual adapter to this network’?? You did the same thing for VMnet3 and VMnet4 too … Why??
And when you say open vSphere client, you mean open it on Windows 7 Box or from inside the vCenter VM ???
TIA
If you select the option ‘Connect a host virtual adapter to this network’, you will have an extra virtual network adapter on your main Windows 7 host. If you give that adapter a valid IP, you can communicate through that adapter with the VMnet2, 3 & 4 networks. But then it won’t be a truly isolated network.
So from a security point of view, deselect the option.
And indeed, you need to open vSphere Client from the vCenter VM. Simply put, you can’t do it from your Windows 7 box because it can’t reach the vCenter.
If you select the option ‘Connect a host virtual adapter to this network’, than you can do it from your Windows 7 machine as well (but then again, your LAB will be exposed to the outside world, making it more vulnerable to threats so best is to install an AV Scanner on your VMs then).
If ESXi1 and ESXi2 along with vCenter on the same network ‘VMnet2′ and this VMnet2 network is connected to an adapter, how am I gonna manage vCenter/ESXi hosts???
Please forgive my silly questions, I am just trying to get the whole picture
All vNICs connected to VMnet2 (or 3 or 4) are able to connect to other vNICs in that same VMnet.
They just can’t get to the ‘host’ (= your Windows 7 desktop), that’s because that option ‘Connect a host virtual adapter to this network’ is not selected.
Compare it with a vSwitch on vSphere with no uplinks. Every vNIC can communicate with other vNICs on that vSwitch/portgroup but can’t get to the outside world.
Sorry I meant ‘no connected to an adapter’
Got it!!!!!! Again, thank you so much
Please let me know anyhow the hardware should support whether you are installing it inside the virtual machine or directly to the machine.
Hi,
i’m afraid i don’t really get your question.
Can you be a bit more specific what your question is exactly?
I am trying to install esxi 5 onto vmware workstation 8 on a hp pavilion g6 laptop. However im am getting a strange error during the installation phase. Precisely right after i hit f11 to accept the EULA agreement.
My physical macine has 4gb ram and its using a i5 processor.
I hve followed the documentation accordingly just like this link – > http://boerlowie.wordpress.com/2011/12/02/building-the-ultimate-vsphere-lab-part-3-vmware-workstation-8/
Could not get further than this.
Any suggestions would greatly help.
cheers
Pls see attachment.
Can you try to run this tools? http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=592
It checks if you have Hardware Assisted VT enabled.
Ive installed it and it displayed the message “This computer is configured with hardware assisted virtualization”. The processor meets the requirement to run windows virtual PC….”
Weird, so your hosts should be okay then.
Can you try to install another 64-bit OS like Windows 2008 R2 to see if that works?
I’ve tried to install both 32bit Win 7 and 64bit Win 7 with no issues. installation went fine. I suspect either the processor doesnt support nested VMs or there is a problem with the installer ISO file ( I doubt this is the problem because it was downloaded directly from vmware).
Weird. Nested VMs shouldn’t be the issue because that will only come into effect when you install a VM running on the virtual ESXi host inside VMware Workstation.
Try downloading the ISO once more, you never know if something got corrupted.