Interim installation of Essentials Plus

[aiea96701]

I currently have two Dell PowerEdge T110 servers setup with ESXi6 hypervisor.  Each Server has 16GB of RAM and local 1TB drives.  My plan is to replace these servers with R630 servers with 24GB RAM but that won't happen for another 3 months as funding arrives.  I've already received our Essentials Plus package and would like to setup on the existing servers so that we can "play" with it and get used to the system.

I am aware of the recommended/minimum requirements but believe that for my purpose I could stretch the minimums a bit until the upgrade servers arrive.  So, my thought is this:

upgrade my ESXi6 hypervisor servers to ESXi6 with the Essentials Plus licenses

Install vCenter with embedded features as an appliance

I only have 2 NICs on each server.  So, I'm planning on connecting the uplinks as follows:

1 uplink - management and Vmotion

1 uplink - VM

I'll keep the local drives for storage BUT when the upgrade servers arrive I plan on converting these T110 servers to NAS servers.  The R640s will come with 4 NICs so I should  be in good shape

I think this will work temporarily for training purposes  Am I correct?  Any advice?

[douglasarcidino · Accepted solution]

Nothing inherently wrong with this. I think that you would be better off just standing up new a new vcenter server for your new hosts and placing them in it together and then decommission this environment afterward. But again, there isn't anything wrong with what you want to do other than the fact that I would place both NICs on a single vSwitch and then configuring the teaming and failover policy for the VMK ports to 1 active and 1 standby just so you have some redundancy across the board. If you are only using local storage though, vMotion doesn't really matter. You're going to lose your mind waiting for VMs to relocate across a single NIC without shared storage.

[aiea96701]

Thanks.  I thought of doing that but I have a couple of other partners that assist and would like some familiarity with vSphere so I thought I'd just stand up what we have and use it for a training session.   Later, when the servers do arrive I'll stand them up, add the license, add vCenter6 to the environment and press on.

[aiea96701]

forgot to mention, I found another older server and will try to set it up as a NAS server so that we can perform some playwork with vMotion, as well.   I have one physical server that we'll maintain as our AD domain controller in the interim and copy across the small data storage to it so that my users will still be able to use the domain environment.  We're a non-profit so there is nothing very sensitive in our environment and we only have about 10 users.