Posted on Friday, 5th June 2009 by Heiko
Being kind of new in the whole virtualization world, my first goal was to setup my own ESX host at home to experiment with. After reading some really great posts from Simon Seagrave, owner of http://www.techhead.co.uk/, and Arne Fokkema, owner of http://ict-freak.nl/, I decided to buy myself a HP ML110 G5 too. I upgraded it with some extra memory (8 GB, the maximum amount supported) and a second harddrive with a capacity of 1 TB to have enough diskspace to play around as much as I would like. The install of VMware vSphere/ESX 4.0 went surprisingly well. Even the onboard ICH-9 chipset is supported as is the onboard Broadcom NetXtreme BCM5722 Gigabit NIC. All hardware gets recognized and installation was a piece of cake. 
After the base install, my goal was to setup a cluster so I could play around with features like VMotion/HA/DRS/FT and all the other great stuff I read about on several blogs, twitter-pages, etc. This post I will describe the problems I encountered setting up the cluster.
First thing to do: arrange some virtual ESX hosts and shared storage
I started with adding a cluster named cluster.verlande.local. Within this cluster I added two VMware ESX 4.0 hosts, running on VMware ESX 4.0! This is possible by following the steps in Eric Gray‘s guide: VMware ESX 4 can even virtualize itself. Short summary of steps to make it possible, with some additions like minimizing the amount of memory used by following the steps Duncan Epping provided with his blogpost:
- Enable promiscuous mode on the vSwitch
- Create a new VM (I used: Guest OS: Linux 64 bit, VM Version 7, 1 vCPU, 2 GB Memory, 10 GB LSI Logic SAS disk, 2 e1000 vNICs)
- Connect the VMware ESX 4.0 ISO and install VMware ESX 4.0 on the virtual machine
- After the installation is done, enter the Service Console by pressing ALT-F1 and log in. Note: Only do this when you are comfortable using a command-line interface!
- Type:
nano /etc/vmware/init/init.d/00.vmnix
(Beware: some people reported using nano wrecked the layout of the file, so be careful editting, and always restore the layout before saving. Using vi as an editor should prevent this too.)
- Change the following line to the desired value:
RequiredMemory=2064384
I changed it to 1024000 since I only have 8 GB memory available in my homelab, and so I want to run the virtual VMware ESX 4.0 hosts with a maximum of 1 GB of memory.
- Save the file by pressing CTRL-o and exit with CTRL+x
- Power the virtual machine down and edit the virtual machine memory settings in your VMware vSphere Client
- Click “Edit Settings” and go to the Options tab / Advanced / General / Configuration Parameters
- Click “Add Row” and add the following values:
Name: monitor_control.restrict_backdoor
Value: TRUE - After these tweaks it is time to power up the virtual ESX host(s) and you should be able to creat and boot Virtual VM’s on the virtual ESX hosts(s).
After those virtual VMware ESX 4.0 hosts are running it was time to create some kind of shared storage. After reading quite some blogposts I decided to go with Openfiler 2.3. First I tried to setup an iSCSI target with some howto’s I found, but I couldn’t get it to work fast enough. Adding the iSCSI target as a new datastore didn’t work, and because of the need to reboot after almost every change I quickly decided to go with NFS. I described the steps I took in my previous blogpost with Free shared NAS/SAN storage using Openfiler 2.3 NFS on VMware ESX 4.0 as title.
So I attached the datastore to both (virtual) VMware ESX 4.0 hosts and I configured the VMotion VMkernel setup. Basically this meant I only had to enable one check box (Vmotion check box) since I already had a nice, working VMotion network ready called “VMotion”:
Enabling Fault Tolerance (FT) logging isn’t needed since the HP ML110 G5 isn’t FT capable. Read this blogpost by Simon Seagrave for more information. Perhaps anywhere in the near future I will buy a second (physical) ESX host with a processor capable to be FT enabled, to play around some more 
After the VMotion network is fully configured, it is time to “Turn On VMware HA” and to “Turn On VMware DRS” by another two check boxes:
After turning on HA, the VMware vCenter Server will install HA agents on the ESX 4.0 hosts that are part of the cluster. The screenshot below is a combination of 4 screenshots:
The first time I tried to enable HA on my very own virtual cluster, the installation of the HA agents failed. The second time I tried, the install still failed! Luckily I remembered reading a blogpost written bij Eric Sloof about unknown HA errors. He describes to add the short hostname to the hosts file on the VMware ESX 4.0 hosts, when you don’t use a DNS server in your homelab to resolve the unknown HA errors. Once I updated the hosts file on all VMware ESX 4.0 hosts, I was able to enable HA (and DRS) without any fuzz.
I now have my very own HA / DRS cluster running om a single HP ML110 G5 (picture is clickable for more detail)!
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Posted in Tech | Comments (6)
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June 5th, 2009 at 17:52 Eric Gray(Quote)
Nice article.
June 6th, 2009 at 12:02 Jan Swinkels(Quote)
Great news that on top of a VMware host you can play with new hosts of the same VMware version to simulate multi host environment.
I missed this feature for more than 4 years under VMware.
Well done!
a great VMware fan
cheers,
Jan
March 29th, 2010 at 21:25 Kenneth(Quote)
You did this with the paid version not the free version correct? Just wondering because I’ am interested in building a home lab and right now I have the free esxi version. How much was the ESX License?
March 31st, 2010 at 13:15 Heiko(Quote)
Hi Kenneth,
I used the 60-day (if I recall correctly) trial version of ESX. The ESX license is too expensive for only homelab usage.
December 22nd, 2010 at 06:19 Ashu Maheshwari(Quote)
I have question does the HA agent get installed automatically. when we are checking the option for HA.
December 22nd, 2010 at 23:16 arun(Quote)
Yes Ashu, it will be installed automatically.