I have an Epyc 7452 (32 cores) on a Supermicro H12SSL-i with 128GB DDR4 3200 memory and ESXi 8.0U2 installed fine and joined vCenter installed as a VM in the default vSS management portgroup.
I want to install whatever is required to simulate a SDDC and cloud infrastructure, including NSX and vSan. I'm entirely new to the VMware platform but my background is HP C7000 Bladesystems, some HP Virtual Connect and Cisco Catalyst networking from over ten years ago.
My initial thought is to install NSX and vSan directly into VMs on the bare-metal ESXi host alongside vCenter and treat this level as the control/management of all the nested esxi infrastructure. Is this a recommended approach for a nested lab?
I'm figuring that NSX can be used to isolate the lab and vSan can present to the nested ESXi hosts using NVME ESA.
I have a 1TB Kingston KC3000 as boot/vmstore for the bare-metal ESXi and would like to pass a second 1TB KC3000 through to the vSan VM to be used as VM store for all nested infrastructure. However, this seems like it will limit this vSan install to a single node, as I cannot split this KC3000 into one NVME namespace for each vSan node in a cluster, or install one SSD per vSan node.
Just a note on NVME namespace SSDs - the Samsung PM9A3 series includes an M.2 variant and this would likely do the trick if I need to eventually cluster vSan though not sure if namespaces can be passed through.
Any thoughts on this approach would be most welcome as I haven't been able to find material that breaks down the technology in a way that can be understood for nested lab scenarios. Cheers.
I want to install whatever is required to simulate a SDDC and cloud infrastructure, including NSX and vSan. I'm entirely new to the VMware platform but my background is HP C7000 Bladesystems, some HP Virtual Connect and Cisco Catalyst networking from over ten years ago.
My initial thought is to install NSX and vSan directly into VMs on the bare-metal ESXi host alongside vCenter and treat this level as the control/management of all the nested esxi infrastructure. Is this a recommended approach for a nested lab?
I'm figuring that NSX can be used to isolate the lab and vSan can present to the nested ESXi hosts using NVME ESA.
I have a 1TB Kingston KC3000 as boot/vmstore for the bare-metal ESXi and would like to pass a second 1TB KC3000 through to the vSan VM to be used as VM store for all nested infrastructure. However, this seems like it will limit this vSan install to a single node, as I cannot split this KC3000 into one NVME namespace for each vSan node in a cluster, or install one SSD per vSan node.
Just a note on NVME namespace SSDs - the Samsung PM9A3 series includes an M.2 variant and this would likely do the trick if I need to eventually cluster vSan though not sure if namespaces can be passed through.
Any thoughts on this approach would be most welcome as I haven't been able to find material that breaks down the technology in a way that can be understood for nested lab scenarios. Cheers.