In the previous post, I’ve deployed and configured the required supporting services. Now it is time to deploy the “core” vSphere part of the lab.

Nested ESXi servers

All the nested ESXi hosts have two uplinks to mimic a real enterprise scenario, i.e. they are equipped with two virtual NICs.

Both uplink NICs are connected to the Nested ESXi Trunk portgroup, which is configured in VGT mode (VLAN ID 4095). This allows to use guest OS VLAN tagging.

The ESXi server VMs are configured with 4 CPUs, 24 GB RAM, and hard disks to simulate local storage. I’m using three of these ESXi servers. The important settings are:

  • Guest OS: VMware ESXi 7.0 or later
  • CPU Hardware virtualization: Expose hardware assisted virtualization to the guest OS (Intel VT-d must be enabled in the BIOS of the HPE ProLiant server)
Nested ESXi VM settings

Once the ESXi VM has been started the first time, ESXi can be installed inside the guest as usual. I’ve used the same vanilla ESXi 7.0 U2 image, which I’ve used for the physical ESXi server.

After the installation has been completed, the management network of the nested ESXi server must be configured, i.e. configure VLAN ID 1611.

Configure the VLAN ID for the nested management network in the ESXi guest

vCenter Servers

I’ve setup two vCenter Servers:

  • Management vCenter: vc1 to manage the physical ESXi server and Management VMs
  • Compute vCenter: vc2 to manage the nested ESXi servers and workload VMs plus NSX-T Edges

Both are deployed as tiny-sized applicances, and configured without Linked Mode and are using their own SSO domain (vsphere.local).

I’ve created two datacenter objects in vc2, with one vSphere cluster consisting of two ESXi servers on site A, and the third ESXi server being put into another vSphere cluster.

The vSphere clusters are enabled with DRS and HA.

The distributed Switch is configured with the following settings:

  • Version: 7.0.0
  • Number of uplinks: 2
  • Network I/O Control: Enabled
  • MTU: 9000 bytes

All ESXi servers are basically configured as follows:

  • ESXi NFS datastore mounted via vSAN vmkernel port
  • Local 100 GB disk are mounted as VMFS6 datastore
  • Domain controller dc1 configured as NTP server
  • SSH enabled, Lockdown Mode disabled
  • Added both uplinks (vmnic0 and vmnic1) to the distributed vSwitch