Deploy vSphere 6.5 Platform Services Controller – PSC

20th October 2017 No Comments

The purpose of this document is to go through the installation of the Platform Services Controller PSC version 6.5, as part 1 of the vCenter Server (Appliance) deployment with an external PSC.

vCenter Server and the vCenter Server components are deployed on one system, and the services included in the Platform Services Controller are deployed on another system.

The following components are included in the vCenter Server and vCenter Server Appliance installations:

The VMware Platform Services Controller group of infrastructure services contains vCenter Single Sign-On, License service, Lookup Service, and VMware Certificate Authority.
The vCenter Server group of services contains vCenter Server, vSphere Web Client, vSphere Auto Deploy, and vSphere ESXi Dump Collector. vCenter Server for Windows also contains the VMware vSphere Syslog Collector. The vCenter Server Appliance also contains the VMware vSphere Update Manager Extension service.

For more information about vSphere 6.5 please refer to the official VMware vSphere documentation here.

For What is Νew in vSphere 6.5 click here.

Let’s start with the installation of the external PSC.

Download the VMware vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 ISO from VMware downloads.

You will see below that the VCSA installer has changed dramatically, it’s a lot cleaner, simpler, and many deployment options (install, upgrade, migrate, restore) are bundled into the same one installer.

Let’s do it.

Lab, VMware, vSphere

Home Lab Environment

5th October 2016 No Comments

Setting up the Home Lab Environment

The main reason behind building a Lab at Home, like many others also do, is to help me study and learn.

The specification of the hardware I used for the Lab can be found here.

To give you a better understanding of the setup and the nesting that is happening, I have drawn the below diagram. You can see that everything is on a single physical machine running VMware ESXi 6.0 U2, and the picture below represents the logical design of my lab. A physical switch, a physical server, and everything else virtual.

Logical Design

The Main Lab “Infrastructure” Setup

Let’s outline what our basic infrastructure components will be for the Lab.

Hostname	OS	Description	Hardware
vgnosisesx01	Vmware ESXi 6.0U2	vGnosis Physical ESXi Host	HP Proliant DL360 G7
vgnosis2k01	Windows 2012 R2	vGnosis Domain Controller and DNS	Virtual Machine
vgnosisvap01	Virtual Appliance – SLES 11	vGnosis PSC (Platform Services Controller)	Virtual Machine
vgnosisvap02	Virtual Appliance – SLES 11	vGnosis VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance)	Virtual Machine
vgnosis2k03	Windows 2012 R2	vGnosis VUM (Vmware Update Manager)	Virtual Machine
sw01	Cisco IOS	vGnosis Cisco Switch	Cisco WS-C3750E-48PD