ESXi 5 Archives | YOUNGTECH

Rapid Provisioning vSphere ESXi 5.0 Hosts Using Image Builder and Auto Deploy (Part 1)

If you haven’t heard or read some of the new capabilities in vSphere 5 around rapid provisioning hosts, allow me to introduce you to Auto Deploy (previously Fling). Auto Deploy is a PXE boot process that loads ESXi into memory thereby eliminating any need for local storage, even USB boot thumb drives. This capability is currently limited in that you may only have one Auto Deploy server per vCenter instance. This pretty much rules out the notion of load balancing the TFTP service, providing multiple image distribution points, or otherwise protecting Auto Deploy with methods other than VMware HA. However, [...]

Implementing a Multi-Node Hypervisor Cluster on a Single Desktop Running VMware Workstation 8

As a field consultant for the last several years, I have been amazed at the numerous deployment scenarios that can be reproduced utilizing just one piece of physical hardware. Due to increasingly expensive electrical bills I trimmed down my server class lab hardware nearly a year ago in favor of a megadesktop that could handle anything I threw at it. While dual-, tri- and quad-boot scenarios have given me the ability of running ESXi, XenServer, Hyper-V, and Windows 7 natively on the hardware, it has been difficult to reproduce complex multi-node hypervisor cluster scenarios without wrangling additional equipment. With the [...]