Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
This adds up to eight NICs per server (again, assuming management and vMotion share a
pair of NICs). For this sort of deployment, you'll want to ensure that you have enough network
ports available, at the appropriate speeds, to accommodate the needs of the vSphere deploy-
ment. This is, of course, only a rudimentary discussion of networking design for vSphere and
doesn't incorporate any discussion on the use of 10 Gigabit Ethernet, FCoE (which, while a stor-
age protocol, impacts the network design), or what type of virtual switching infrastructure you
will use. All of these other factors would affect your networking setup.
How About GbE NICs?
Lots of factors go into designing how a vSphere deployment will integrate with the existing net-
work infrastructure. For example, it has been only in the last few years that 10GbE networking has
become pervasive in the datacenter. h is bandwidth change fundamentally changes how virtual
networks are designed.
In one particular case, a company wished to upgrade its existing rack-mount server clusters with
six NICs and two Fibre Channel HBAs to two dual-port 10GbE CNAs. Not only physically was
there a stark diff erence from a switch and cabling perspective but the logical confi guration was
signifi cantly diff erent too. Obviously this allowed for greater bandwidth to each host but it also
allowed for more design fl exibility.
h e fi nal design used VMware Network IO Control (NOIC) and Load-Based Teaming (LBT) to share
available bandwidth between the necessary types of tra c but only restricted bandwidth when the
network was congested. h is resulted in an e cient use of the new bandwidth capability without
adding too much confi guration complexity. Networking is discussed in more detail in Chapter 5.
With these questions answered, you at least have the basics of a vSphere deployment estab-
lished. As we mentioned previously, this has been far from a comprehensive or complete dis-
cussion on designing a vSphere solution. We do recommend that you i nd a good resource on
vSphere design and consider going through a comprehensive design exercise before actually
deploying vSphere.
Deploying VMware ESXi
Once you've established the basics of your vSphere design, you have to decide exactly how you
are going to deploy ESXi.
There are three ways to deploy ESXi:
Interactive installation of ESXi
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Unattended (scripted) installation of ESXi
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Automated provisioning of ESXi
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Of these, the simplest is an interactive installation of ESXi. The most complex—but perhaps
the most powerful, depending on your needs and your environment—is automated provisioning
of ESXi. In the following sections, we'll describe all three of these methods for deploying ESXi in
your environment.
Let's start with the simplest method i rst: interactively installing ESXi.
