Adding physical hosts to ESXi

[mahmoodn]

Hi

As a Rocks user, I have started to work with vmware for some clustering purposes. I have installed vmware ESXi on one node and I can access to the management dashboard via web. There, I can not see anything about adding another host.

I have searched and there are some other products such as vSphere and vCenter. I also have read the differences. However, still I don't know which one fits my need. Which product is needed? Any advice?

[a_p_]

What's required in order to manage multiple hosts is a vCenter Server instance. Please note that this requires paid licenses for vCenter Server as well as for the ESXi hosts. There's however a 60-day evaluation period after installing the products.

Btw. vSphere is the name of the whole suite.

André

[mahmoodn]

So, do you mean

VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) 6.7U1

or

VMware vCenter Server 6.7U1

?

Do you mean that vSphere contains vCenter?

Also, I see standard, advanced and enterprise for them. Does that matter?

[mahmoodn]

VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) 6.7U1 is about 300MB while VMware vCenter Server 6.7U1 is about 4GB. So, how vCenter is a subset of vSphere?

[a_p_]

The names have changes a couple of times, so let's put it this way.

What's required to manage a cluster is an instance of vCenter Server (license per instance), and one ore more ESXi hosts (licensed per physical CPU socket).

There are also a few other licensing options available. For the features you get with the different editions, see e.g. Server Virtualization Software | vSphere | VMware

André

[sk84]

ESXi is the hypervisor software that must be installed on a (mostly physical) server and this hypervisor software runs the virtual machines. vCenter is a management platform for multiple ESXi hosts and is delivered as seperate appliance. With vCenter virtual machines can be balanced automatically across multiple ESXi hosts or if one ESXi host fails, vCenter can start the virtual machines which were running on this failed host on other healthy ESXi hosts, just for example. But vCenter can do a lot more things for an easier management.

vCenter and ESXi can be purchased as a bundle because many organizations need both. This bundle is called "vSphere". When someone talks about a vSphere environment, they usually mean the combination of ESXi and vCenter.

ESXi, vCenter or vSphere in general have different licensing editions with different features. The more expensive, the more features are included.

For a comparison of the different editions and features, see this white paper (page 5+6):

https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/products/vsphere/vmware-vsphere-vs...

[mahmoodn]

Ok I understand something but still I am in the Rocks environment! Lets talk about the trial versions.

In the Rocks, we install a big image on the main node which is called frontend. Then a lighter image is created for the compute nodes and they boot from the network to fetch the light image from the frontend.

What I understand here, is that I have to install the 300mb esxi on the main node and all other nodes. All nodes have the same OS image which is the 300mb esxi. Then I have to install the big vCenter on the main node and there I can add the compute nodes to the vCenter.

Is that correct?

[sk84 · Accepted solution]

You install on all physical servers the ESXi image and do the basic network configuration for each of these hosts. After that, you install either the vCenter Server Appliance on one of these ESXi hosts directly (recommended) or create a virtual machine with windows and install vCenter Server on this virtual machine (deprecated). If the vCenter Server installation is successfull, you can connect via the vSphere (Web) client to the vCenter Server, create a datacenter object and cluster object and add all ESXi hosts to this cluster.

Maybe these install guides will help you:

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.7/vsphere-vcenter-server-67-installation-guide.pdf

http://masteringvmware.com/how-to-install-esxi-6-7-step-by-step/

http://masteringvmware.com/how-to-install-vcsa-6-7-step-by-step/

[mahmoodn]

OK. Thanks. I will try that and will come back later. Cheers...

[mahmoodn]

Excuse me. One more question...

I have only one valid IP which can access to the main node via internet. Via the console, I have enabled 2 physical NICs. I have set the static IP to one interface. However, I don't see any way to assign another internal IP address to the second NIC.