Part 1: VMware vCloud Director in my homelab

by | Mar 18, 2011 | vCloud, vCloud Director |

In this first part I want to show you the resources needed for installing a vCloud director homelab. There are a couple of things that are not supported by VMware. So installing it this way is not supported and you should not use in a production environment, this should be only installed i a homelab environment.

For installing i used the following websites:

Duncan Epping (@DuncanYB) post: Creating a vCD Lab on your Mac/Laptop

Chris Colottis’s (@CColotti) post: VMware-vCloud-in-a-box-for-your-home-lab

VMware vCloud director (@VMware): vCloud Director overview

VMware vCloud Installation and Configuration Guide: PDF

VMware vCloud Director Evaluator’s Guide: PDF

Hardware used:

In my homelab I’ll use the following hardware:

1 x Homebrew workstation Windows 7 64-bit installed with workstation 7.1 12 GB Memory and 3 Network cards

2 x Homebrew ESXi 4.1 servers with 8 GB RAM 4 Nics and a Intel Q6700 processor

1 x Homebrew ESXi 4.1 server with 16 GB RAM 4 Nics and a Intel Xeon 3440 processor

Software used:

VMware ESXi 4.1, VMware vCenter server 4.1 VMware vShield and VMware vCloud Director: download here

Microsoft Windows 2008 32-bit as a AD/DNS server: download a trial here

Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 64-bit for vCenter server: download a trial here

CentOS 5.5 DVD install: download here

Oracle 10g Express 32-bit for linux: download here

Vyatta Core Routing: download here

Installation plan:

I made a simple visio drawing of what my lab will look like after I installed my vCloud environment:

vCloud

There are a couple of Pre-requisites of which I presume they are already in place, they are:

  • the windows machine with workstation 7.1
  • The 3 ESXi servers
  • A NAS/SAN (for a excellent Openfiler guide go to this blogpost made by Simon Seagrave @kiwi_si)
  • The Windows server 2008 (R2) AD/DNS installation

As said I presume they are already installed and as so, I will not handle those. There are plenty guide online for these installations.

My vCenter server will use the database server provided by the VMware software. I will do a seperate post on installing CentOS with the installation of the Oracle 10g Express database for the vCloud Director software.

I will devide all this into 4 parts:

  1. Part 1: VMware vCloud director in my homelab
  2. Part 2: Getting Vyatta Core Router up and running
  3. Part 3: Installing CEntOS and getting Oracle 10g Express
  4. Part 4: Installing vShield manager and vCloud Director

Hope to see you on Part 2 😉