Home Lab - vSphere and vCenter Installation and Configuration Guide 

That's fantastic. I'm glad this helped you move forward

Thank you for your kind words

Thank you very much. We try to hear them towards bringing you value

Thank you

Any time!

Fantastic! I'm glad you liked it

More to come!

Glad it helped

You bet!

Glad you got it figured out

You're very welcome

You're weclome. FYI - My name is Justin Henderson. I don't always mention it in the videos as I try to focus on getting content out there for everyone

@@HASecuritySolutions So sorry. Good to know that Justin :-)

@@nafis195 No worries at all. :-)

Coming soon!

I'm glad it helped

Thank you

The deployment changes from client to client. Maybe that would be a good topic for a future video

Thank you

You are very welcome

You're welcome

Thank you

That one will be a good discussion

Thank you

You're very welcome

It's definitely helpful

Thank you

You're welcome

That's no fun. I've not had to do this but thank you for sharing how to make this work

Thank you. Unfortunately, vSAN is likely on the back burner for awhile as most of my videos will be security centric concepts

Late response but yes!

I'd love to help on this one but SRM isn't on our road map for upcoming videos. We've got a laundry list of things I need to record and get posted. I just wanted to respond

Unfortunately not. That requires vcenter

That's actually a good question that a lot of folks think but don't ask. So thank you for the opportunity to clarify. The easiest method is typically to run the vcenter installer on your local machine but have it install vCenter as a VM on top of your vsphere hypervisor. You could install it elsewhere but for a home lab I'd recommend installing it to vsphere

What error is any shows up in vsphere?

A single host vSphere so makes sense but probably not vCenter. That is unless you want to play with multiple virtual vSphere instances with vCenter for learning. I, personally, would just do a single host

@@HASecuritySolutions okay, that's what I currently have. As for vlans, if I want to experiment with different products (pfSense, Splunk, Suricta, Security Onion, Kali, Metasploitable, Domain Controller, etc), how would you set that up? Do you, or will you, cover that?

@@ordahackney7131 Yes. We will. Also, on a single host you can implement vlans without doing so at the switch level

@@HASecuritySolutions So, I should not turn on vlans in the ESXi interface? Where you set yours to 300?

@@ordahackney7131 You would not at a vlan on your host. I'll do a live stream later where we can go through vlans, routing, and more to show how you could place your vms and route Grigg things like pfSense and have multiple subnets

I believe the recommendation at this point (if not the requirement) is to deploy vcenter as a virtual appliance on top of vsphere.

That is correct. The free version does not include the use of those features. If you are wanting that functionality in a free hypervisor, you might check out proxmox

That's really surprising. I've had slower cpus that were still snappy. First thing I'd check is your power settings. They may be affecting your speed by trying to lower power consumption. Also, run benchmark software to validate your machine is operating at expected performance

Are you referring to VMware license? If so it's an annual license. The three year subscription is not much more than the one year so I typically recommend that essentials deal

Just saw your other post

Yes it is. You have to have a processor that supports virtualization and then a hypervisor that supports hardware assisted virtualization. Many processors support virtualization although you may have to not into bios to enable it. Many hypervisors support hardware assisted virtualization so long as you are on newer versions

I get it. You have to manage it from another PC on the network?

Yes. You are correct

You can install vcenter on a dedicated server or even as a virtual appliance on top of one of your hypervisors. A lot of companies install it as a virtual appliance. It works fine. However, if there is ever an issue with one of the hypervisors that vcenter is running on, it can cause cascading failures. One can argue that VMware HA heartbeats should catch a hypervisor issue and fail it over to another hypervisor, but I've experienced multiple issues that HA would not trigger a failure that left virtual vCenter servers in an offline state. The cascading failure is typically due to vcenter needing to authorize ports on a distributed vSwitch or other cloud services. I'm not stating deploy a virtual vcenter on hypervisors is bad. I'm just stating if you do you should consider high availability aspects. There are multiple ways to work around this. Example: The vCenter VM should use a NIC assigned to a virtual switch that uses ephemeral ports so that vcenter has network traffic. Otherwise, vcenter will not come up as a distributed switch requires vcenter to authorize it's own NIC which cannot happen.

@@HASecuritySolutions Thanks a lot for your response. so it is valid to say that it is better or the best practice is to install Vcenter in separated server, correct? if so, can we install it in a dedicated desktop with win 10?

I hope I didn't come across as bragging in the video. I apologize if I did. I want to be humble in all of these videos

@@HASecuritySolutions It's ok, just off in the weeds a bit. Would go well in a video specifically about vserver networking.

I do not believe the M1 processors will support this.

You are correct. vSphere would run as your operating system.