During the whole installation process I’m connected to our Windows vCenter 5.5 via RDP.

For the VM-storage I already prepared two NFS-shares (one for VMs the other one for templates). The whole installation will take place on the physical vSphere 5.5 environment. For this vSphere 6 setup I gonna install vSphere 6.0 using the vCSA (aka vCenter Server Appliance) 6.0 and up to 3 nested ESXi 6.0 Hosts. Having done that several times before, there are already nested vSphere 5.5 and vSphere 5.1 environments running. Existing SituationĪt opvizor I’ve got access to an existing vSphere 5.5 cluster based on Cisco UCS, NetApp and PureStorage including a Microsoft Windows vCenter and several (physical) ESXi 5.5 Hosts. Since I’ve done this already several times with the older versions of vSphere I feel it’s very handy, I thought to blog about the installation process the next time I´m doing it myself, so here we go. So it keeps you agile handling your ressources, offers the possiblity to quickly deploy and remove entities like hypervisors and VMs.

It offers nearly all features of a “real” infrastructure and you still gain all the advantages of using virtual machines. Since I cannot use unlimited resources and want to keep everything flexible to test various scenarios, the ideal solution is a virtualized VMware vSphere infrastructures. As I don’t want to use (and wouldn’t recommend to anyone) the productive infrastructure for testing, I needed something else. During my daily work as a Systems Engineer at opvizor I’m frequently facing scenarios where customers or developers are asking for things that have to be reproduced in a vSphere environment.

Vmware vcenter appliance 6.0