then this type of virtual disk is created it takes up all the space you allocate, ESX virtual disks do not grow as more data is created inside them, this format offers the best performance. As a flat file, the virtual disk will be created in contiguous blocks within the VMFS volume.

When the disk is created the file is created very quickly and any existing data on the physical disk is overwritten as data is written to the virtual disk as needed.

with a thin virtual disk you may ask for 30GB disk, it actually grows in size as yo add more data, this is a good space-saving format for test VM's or VDI environments where you are trying to reduce storage costs.

Note that this format is incompatible with the Fault Tolerance (FT) feature

Creating the first VM

I have opened a vSphere client session and selected my ESXi server, from here if you click on the "getting started" tab you can see in the window a "create a new virtual machine" or if you look in the top left-hand corner the "New virtual machine " icon can be used

The next screen is the configuration screen, here selecting typical will select most of the defaults for you

Selecting custom you can customize a number of options (compare the left panel with the one above), this is the one I will be choosing so that we can cover all the options.

Next we can enter a meaningful name, I generally keep them the same name as the hostname

Next we can select one of our datastores, I am choosing vmware1_vs1 (Local 500GB disk) which means that this server could not be used in vMotion, we will be looking at vMotion in another section.

The next screen ask you what version of Virtual machine type you want to use, as you can see in the image, I have chosen the latest version, you can also see in the image what each version supports

As I mentioned earlier I am going to put Oracle Enterprise Linux 64-bit as the guest O/S on this server. There a vast number of guest o/S you can choose here.

Now select the number of CPU's, remember if you are replacing an existing physical server with a virtual one, then try and reduce the amount of resources that you need, you can easily increase them.

I have selected the minimum amount of memory for a Linux server, 1GB would be fine, again give the server as least as you can then start increasing if needs must.

Here I add a couple of virtual NIC's to my VM, one public NIC and one NIC which is attached to my iSCSI network.

There are now four types of SCSI controllers you can use, it all depends on what guest OS you will be installing, the installation will basically pick the best one suitable for your guest OS, so I generally select the default

• Buslogic Parallel - used for older os such as windows 2000
• LSI Logic Parallel - idea for Linux OS and windows 2003
• LSI Logic SAS - faster and used with SAS drives, use on the latest OS
• VMware Paravirtual - new virtual storage adapter which lowers CPU load and increases disk I/O throughput

This is the file that will contain your guest OS, you can use an already existing disk or leave and configure it later, I selected to create the disk now

I give it a size, 15GB should be more than enough to install Linux (this will include the /, /boot and swap area), I have already discuss disk types above, here I am sticking to the default thick/zeroedthick but as it is only a test environment I could have chosen Thin Provisioning

Because the VM has the appearance of real hardware it confirm to the SCSI convention adapter 0 and ID 0 are used as the boot disk (SCSI 0:0) with the SCSI adapter as ID 7. You can have up to 15 virtual disks attached to each adapter. You also have IDE support to allow you to use older operating systems (windows 95, windows 98), again the ESXi server will generally pick the best solution for the guest OS you chose.

Finally you get to the summary screen, click finish and the virtual machine will be created

In the main window on the vSphere client you should see it being created, I was not quick enough as it created before i took the snapshot.

In the Virtual Machines tab of your ESXi server you should be able to see it

if you select the VM and click on the "summary" tab to can see what the VM has installed, you can see the 2vCPU's, 1GB of memory, the two NIC's and the disk allocated to it and where its virtual disks are located (vmware1_vs1)

There are a number of places where you can power on/off/restart your VM, selecting the ESXi server and then clicking on the virtual machine tabs, you have two ways

If you select the virtual machine and select the "getting started" tab, you have another way

There is also one way in the "summary" tab, this will change to power off and restart when the VM is running

ESX has the ability to gracefully power off and on your VMs if you chose to shut down or reboot a ESXi server, this guest shutdown feature requires you to install the VMware Tools on to each VM.

If you use features such as vMotion, DRS and HA do not use this feature as it can cause all sorts of problems

1. In the vSphere client select the ESX host
2. Then select the configuration tab
3. In the software panel select Virtual Machine Startup/Shutdown
4. In the top right corner select properties
5. in the dialog box (as seen in the image below), tick the "allow virtual machines to start and stop automatically with the system"
6. select the VM and use the "Move up" button to move it up the list, keep going until it goes into the "Automatic Startup" selection, then the "Edit" button will be available and the VM will be enabled

By selecting the "edit settings" in the VM "summary" tab, we can additional hardware such as

• increase/decrease the number of vCPU's
• increase/decrease the amount of RAM
• add additional disks (see below for adding Raw disks)
• add or remove NIC's

By adding a hardware component you will be taken to the similar screen you used to create the virtual machine screen, now you can see why I wanted to show you the custom setup.

There are times when you want you VM to have direct access to a SAN or iSCSI, this ia achieved by a special mapping file called RDM (Raw Device Mapping), this metadata text file tells the VM which LUN to access, the VMkernel intercedes (binary translation) on its behalf using the VMKernel drivers to access the SAN or iSCSI via the ESXi hosts physical HBA

There are several reasons to use RDM files in preference to virtual disks

• You may have existing data held with NTFS, ext3 or another proprietary file system to which you merely wish the VM to have access
• RDM files are required for some clustering scenarios, such as running a clustering service between two VMs on separate ESXi servers
• You may wish to leverage you guest OS's native disk and file system tools to carry out certain tasks. For example the Microsoft DiskPart tool allows you to carry out certain tasks to stretch an NTFS partition to fill free space
• Some 3rd party software like EMC's replication manager software may require RDM style files to the array to function correctly.

The maximum size a RDM file can be is 2TB, there are two compatibility modes, note that you can convert a RDM file into a virtual disk file this can be done with either vMotion (SvMotion) or via cold migration, we will cover this in my vMotion section.

• physical - allows the VM to treat the raw LUN as if it were a physical machine, ideal for clustering and quorum devices (MCSC, Sun Cluster, etc)
• virtual - allows the VM to treat the raw LUN as if it were a virtual disk, this allows for advanced features such as disk modes and VMware snapshot files.

RDM will have a .vmdk extension just like virtual disks, they can be stored alongside the VM's other files or in a different datastore.

To create a RDM file for a VM follow below, right click on the VM (you can use the newly created one called linux01 above) and select "edit settings", then click the "add" button, then choose "hard disk" and the below screen should appear, select "Raw Device Mapping"

I create a 1GB iSCSI volume on my openfiler iSCSI server, to use for this demonstration

I prefer to store with the VM as it keeps it all tidy but you can select a different datastore location if you wish

Now we come to the compatibility mode, again if you are going to use this with a cluster or as a quorum device you should select physical, otherwise select virtual

You can specify the SCSI LUN location, but generally the default is OK

Finally we get to a summary page, make sure you are happy as there is no going back

You now should be able to see it in you hardware tab of the VM

You can also see it in the VM volume directory, its called "linux-01_1-rdmp.vmdk", when we build the guest OS it will be available to the VM to use.

In older versions of ESX you had to use the vmkfstools command to change a disk type, the VM must be powered off and then locate the virtual disk that you wish to convert and then right click in the virtual disk and select "inflate", I have located the the linux01 virtual disk in the vmware1_vs1 datastore, using the datastore browser and selecting the linux01 folder I have access to the virtual disk.

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There are a number of options you can change

• virtual machine name
• OS type
• boot options (idea if you need a longer boot process so you can select the boot device or bios)
• VMware Tools has the power on options
• General Menu we can turn on debugging

Most of the the time I leave them on the default settings

A number of OS support hot adding, thus when you add an additional CPU or memory will be available to the OS immediately, you can enable this feature from the options tab and selecting "Memory/CPU hotplug"

VMware has three types of execution

• Direct Execution - VM will speak natively to the underlying physical CPU to make direct calls to the instruction set of the CPU, this offers the best performance
• Binary Execution - occurs whenever there is an interrupt request generated inside the VM by the guest OS, interrupts are intercepted or translated down through the VMkernel (the hypervisor) to a real, physical device using a device driver, however it is slower then direct execution.
• Paravirtualization - the guest OS is given some awareness to a layer just above the hypervisor to which the VM hooks into, this is know as VMI Paravirtualization, however it does use a PCI slot inside the VM, it can also cause problem with vMotion if all ESXi servers support this, it is also incompatible with fault tolerance (FT)

The MMU (Memory Management Unit) is called the Hardware Page Table Virtualization, it may or may not improve performance, it all depends if you CPU supports this feature and if you workloads are memory-intensive. Within the VMkernel, there are two page tables one for VM memory the other for physical memory, the VMkernel maps the hexidecimal memory ranges from one to the other. As the VMkernel is fundamentally the attributer of access to hardware this allows for avoiding the duplication of memory connects within and between VM's commonly referred to as Transparent Page Sharing (TPS), it also allows VMware to deallocate memory from one VM to another using a memory driver installed to the guest OS along with VMware Tools. This does in additional CPU costs, both Intel and AMD offer in there new CPU's hardware-based page table system, commonly referred to as Nested Page Table (NPT). The VMkernel will interrogate the CPU and allow the VM to use the MMU if it is available, otherwise it simple ignores it.

The last screen is the resource allocation, which I will be covering in great detail in the resource monitoring section

Using either the vSphere client or vCenter go to the datastore store screen, right-click the datastore and select "browse datastore", I have created a folder in datastore filer2_ds1 called iso, this is where we will put the iso image

I have downloaded Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.5 64-bit from Oracle's website on to my PC.

Now select the upload button and select the downloaded ISO image

You should now see a screen indicating how long it will take to upload the ISO image to the datastore

Finally you should a screen similar to below, which means we can now use this image to boot and install Linux onto our VM

The booting of an iso image is the same for all OS's, first select the VM and right-click and select "edit settings", then select the CD/DVD drive 1, then click the "DataStore ISO file" radio button then select the "browse.." button, find your ISO image

Once selected you should have a similar screen below, make sure the "connect at power on" button is ticked.

Now power on the VM and open a console and install the OS as normal

1. Right-click on your windows VM
2. Select guest
3. Select Upgrade/Install VMware Tools, then click OK
4. Next choose the type of installation you want to run (typical is sufficient)

In the background Windows will connect to a ISO file called "windows.iso" held on the ESXi server, hopefully Windows will automatically run this CD and execute the VMware Tools.msi file.

In Unix there are a number of different types of packages depending on the guest OS installed, I will describe the Linux installation process

1. Right-click on your Linux VM
2. Select guest
3. Select Upgrade/Install VMware Tools, then click OK

4. This will mount a filesystem called "/media/VMware Tools" (yes there is a space in there), in this directory you will see a file called "VMwareTools-?????.tar.gz" , depending on the VMware Tools version

5. copy this file locally and unzip and untar it, you will have a directory called "vmware-tools-distrib", cd into this directory and run "vmware-install.pl" script
6. You will be asked a number of very easy questions (many create directory questions), I selected the default for all options
7. The package will now be installed and various daemons started, the vmware filesystem will be automatically unmounted for you, there is no need to reboot your server, if you used a GUI interface it is advised to logout and log back to enable certain X-system features.

You should be able to see the VMware daemons running on your system

I am going to use my Linux VM I created earlier (linux01) which is powered on and running, to create a snapshot right-click the VM and choose "snapshot" and then select "take snapshot", a dialog box will appear, you can supply a meanful name, a brief description and you can quiesce the file system, if you wish.

If you list the volume on the ESXi server you can see the snapshot delta files

I sometimes leave a note on the VM configuration tab to let me know I am snapshotting

This then displays in the main vSphere or vCenter virtual machine screen

You can use two ways to revert to a snapshot, reverting to the last snapshot (quick way) or use snapshot manager, the quick way you right-click the VM, select snapshot, select "revert to current snapshot", if you want a particular snapshot, right-click on the VM, select snapshot, then select snapshot manager, as you can see below you then can select which snapshot you want

Although you have reverted you are still have the snapshot feature engaged ans thus the delta files will continue to grow