Installed ESXi in Workstation in Ubuntu 12.04. Not sure whats next.

[pritesh]

Hi,

I have an laptop which I recently upgraded to 8 GB RAM. Windows 7 kept crashing on it, so did the following:

1) Installed Ubuntu 12.04

2) Installed VMWare Workstation 9.0 Evaluation Version

3) Installed ESXi 5 (VMware-VMvisor-Installer-5.0.0.update01-623860.x86_64) inside the workstation.

4) Installation completed and then I got a message to logon to an IP Address to download tools.

Thats a page on VMWare's site that tells me to download and install VMWare VCenter. Its again an evaluation version.

Kindly let me know:

1) Can I install VCenter straight on the Host Ubuntu 12.04 ? From what I read, Linux Compatible Version of VCenter Server is available. So what will that use as a Database? In Windows, it uses MS SQL, so if this is a Linux Compatible Version, will it use MySQL/PostGRESQL or Oracle?

2) Will it be better to install Windows 2003 or something like that in Workstation and install VCenter inside that?

If the evaluation copies of all of these get expired, can I re download evaluation copies?

I am doing all this so that I can study for VCP.

Please help me.

[scott28tt]

The Linux version of vCenter Server is a ready-made VM - download the vCenter Server Appliance and add it to Workstation - it has a built-in database.

To build a minimum setup for VCP prep you'll need a second ESXi host and some "shared" storage - build a VM using FreeNAS or OpenFiler to achieve that.

Use the vSphere Web Client from a web browser, you can do that directly from your host system if you have the vSphere VM's network configuration in Workstation set correctly.

You can rebuild the whole setup once the evaluation period passes, that will be good VCP practice too - you don't need to download the components again though.

When are you taking the required vSphere training?