bosh-lab

A single-box lab environment for vSphere, NSX-T, BOSH, CF and more

Hardware

Standard Dell workstation, Precisoin T5820. 4 core Intel(R) Xeon(R) W-2223 CPU @ 3.60GHz/500GB NVME/32GB RAM
Add more disks. 1 x 2TB NVME replacing the 500GB NVME. 2 x 2TB SATA SSD
Add more RAM. 4 x 32GB (Kingston KSM26RD4/32MEI)

After upgrade, the workstaton has 4 core, 6TB disk space, 160 GB mem.

Basic setup

upgrade BIOS

Download latest BIOS from Dell and save it (a .EXE file) on a flash disk (don't use exFAT).
Plug the flash drive on the workstation
Power on the workstation, Press F12 and select ugprade BIOS

build a esxcli docker image if work from Mac

We are going to run esxcli from Docker because there are not Mac version yet.

download esxcli 7.0 for Linux from https://code.vmware.com/web/tool/7.0/esxcli
build a docker image
```
cd esxcli
docker build . -t esxcli
```

install ESXi 7.0 on the workstation

download ESXi ISO

make a bootalbe flash drive on Mac

D=/dev/disk2
diskutil unmountDisk $D
diskutil eraseDisk MS-DOS ESXI MBR $D
open ~/Downloads/VMware-VMvisor-*.iso
rsync -avH /Volumes/ESXI-*/ /Volumes/ESXi/
sed -i '' 's/boot.cfg/& -p 1/' /Volumes/ESXI/ISOLINUX.CFG
diskutil unmountDisk $D

install vCenter

Import the OVA file
Select small type
install licenses

create a single node cluster

Turn on DRS, so that we can create resource pool

Labs

Lab 1: deploy Bosh on single node cluster

Use bbl: https://github.com/cloudfoundry/bosh-bootloader/blob/main/docs/getting-started-vsphere.md Or
Use bosh create-env directly: https://bosh.io/docs/init-vsphere/
deploy a dummy deployment

bosh deploy -d dummy bosh-1/dummy.yml

Lab 2: vSAN

Install a ESX vm template following https://www.vhussam.com/my-vsan-lab-6-7u3-nested-esxi-servers/
- 10GB cache disk
- 100GB capacity disk
- turn on nested VT-X
clone 3 ESX vms
- enable vSAN on VMkernel nic
create a cluster with DRS and vSAN enabled

Appendix: IP addresses

192.168.1.x	host
1	gw, dns
5	jumpbox
6	bosh-1
88	native ESXi
89	vcenter
90-92	vsan ESXi
100-109	bosh-1 managed vms

syslxg / bosh-lab