My lab environments have gone through some serious trial and error in the past, but this weekend is setup to be a grand success. In preparation for EMC World 2012 (more on that later), I have been allocated a pretty great, albeit hodgepodge, setup.

>> Two ESXi 4.1 servers with 8GB and 32GB respectively & 4 NICs each
>> One VNXe 3300 series with 2.8TB of SAS storage & IO modules totaling 12 NICs

Let the games begin.  

IS THAT NOT AN EPIC LAB CONFIGURATION?!

Eric Gray’s work is towards the top of my googling for “Virtualized ESXi 5 on ESXi” and it proved quite useful. He focuses on getting nested ESXi 5 systems to run in an Inception-esque way. It’s great to see is that VMware recognized the power of this configuration and now gives you a profile under Other ready for ESXi 5 nestings.

That’s a great trick for ESXi 5 users, but I’m running ESXi 4.1 on the hardware and virtualizing 5. I knew someone must have done so already, and thankfully I found Juan Manuel Rey’s post concluding in such. With Juan’s vBlessing, I moved forward primarily following Eric’s detailed layout.

I followed his vSwitch configuration advice to the T, but still managed to find my first headache.

No Network Adapters aka This is Why We Don't Have Nice Things

Now I followed Eric’s directions and setup four vNICs, so how could it not be seeing them??

What I didn’t notice in my haste of hardware configuration was that I left the default network settings in place…

You spot the problem?

Adapter type is set to VMXNET 3, though Eric’s blog post clearly shows the adapter type should be E1000.

Ahh, the devil is in the details.

Foolish mistake, but the kind that is as real-world as it gets. Sometimes our goal to complete a task precedes our desire to do it right the first time. Luckily gems of knowledge like well-documented blog posts are littered all over the ‘nets.

Upon reboot, I crossed the network adapter stage with no issue.

Now what?

There was one more devil-in-the-detail moment for this installation… and this one I didn’t spot on my own. The installer was barking that no storage was available.

No Storage = no bueno

But why? I’ve allocated storage already.

I didn’t spot the answer this round and was looking for the equivalent of a phone a friend button.

Thankfully I never feel alone when it comes to virtualization.

Being the active socialite I am, I popped the question out there first thing in the morning this morning. One or two tweet later, I had some useful and other hilarious responses.

Ask and you shall receive both useful and snark-based answer.

The lion’s share of answers were right on – ESXi doesn’t play well with the paravirtual SCSI controller type. I saw the goodness that is C0:T0:L0 after the switch to LSI Logic SAS.

Now we’re at the most rewarding screen you can get to on an ESXi install.

#!/usr/bin/nerdherd

Cody Bunch, virtualization demigod, blogging machine and script ninja at Rackspace, has a mantra for those new to virtualization: install software, blog about it. Use software, blog about it. If errors arise, blog about it. When fixed, blog about it. Repeat.

I pay thanks to him and many others I can rely on in the community by giving back to it. It all leads back to one though:

Posts like these reminds me of the simplest reason I blog: so that no one has to make the same mistake twice.