1) Firmware Upgrades, make sure VT & DEP are enabled.

2) If Blade Chassis

a. Make sure networking is ready, i.e. virtual connect

b. Rename blade in chassis/iLo

3) If using shared storage (and you better be)

a. Fiber Channel

    i. setup VSAN’d and Zoned.

b. iSCSI

    ii. Properly setup

c. Present LUN(s) to Server

4) Install ESX or ESXi

5) ESXi only

a. Change Root Password

b. Change IP to static

c. Change hostname

6) Allow SSH (if you want)

7) Install Hardwareproviders/ agents, i.e. HP ESX Agent

8) Add to vCenter

9) Apply vCenter templates (this should do the following automatically)

a. Setup Networking vNics, vMotion & Management

b. NTP

c. NFS storage

10) Patch with VUM

11) Setup Monitoring, SiteScope, vCM, etc..

12) Add to Lab Manager

1) no timezone support, ESXi is set to UTC only. (but this doesn't cause any issues that I can find)
2) No export to SMB (window) file shares, so users can't export VMs or templates.

\\servername\c$\ProgramData\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\sysprep

 

that’s ProgramDATA, not program files..

I wanted a template I could add to Lab Manager so it would auto start with a new hostname and IP address every time, I used CentOS 5.5 because there is a RedHat 5 64bit tools for guest customization already available.  I created a VM with a 10GB system and a 40GB data drive based off of RH5x64. 

There are many good guides to get TGT installed and working, this was probably the best one. 

I still had quite a few issues, but here is some good info that helped me sort it all out.

If your like me, doing something one time is nice, but ultimately not useful, you need this service to auto-start or it’s pretty much useless, therefore I think the tgtadm anc tgt-admin commands are only good for testing/setup.

Most of the guides have you setup a test file that you mount, that’s great for testing, but I wanted to map a whole physical (vm) drive, for me that was /dev/sdb.  I thought for a while my problem was that I needed to partition that drive i.e. /dev/sdb1, but luckily that isn’t necessary, I tested it both ways.

All I really needed to do was this:

1) Install TGT – yum install scsi-target-utils

2) make the tgtd service auto start - chkconfig tgtd on

3) make the firewall auto-stop (this is a lab application) - chkconfig iptables off

4) modify the /etc/tgt/targets.conf file to look something like this:

<target iqn.2008-09.com.example:server.target1>
    backing-store /dev/sdb
</target>

5) reboot and your done.

 

Here are some useful commands for testing:

Show what your current setup looks like (this is the most useful of the tgtadm commands = 

tgtadm --lld iscsi --op show --mode target

The second most useful is this one, it reloads your TGT from the targets.conf file so you can see if you have it working right =

tgt-admin –e

 

The rest are mildly useful.

Setup a test target = tgtadm --lld iscsi --op new --mode target --tid 1 -T iqn.2001-04.com.1234:example

Setup a test LUN on above target = tgtadm --lld iscsi --op new --mode logicalunit --tid 1 --lun 1 -b /dev/sdb

Allow all IP’s to use your target = tgtadm --lld iscsi --op bind --mode target --tid 1 -I ALL                     (theoretically this is not needed per all documentation, but I found otherwise)

There was a mistake made on initial setup of an ESX host, and the Clariion grabbed that info and would not let go.  I spent quite a while looking for “delete”, to no avail.  I know the ESX hosts are correct now, but I can’t get the Clariion to refresh, the solution was to go to each SP and “Restart Management Server”, upon reboot they rescanned and found the correct info. http://SPAipaddress/setup, and http://SPBipaddress/setup

After the reboot, everything looks good and I was able to add the correct hosts to the storage groups.

if your ever stuck trying to use /nascmd/sbin/clariion_mgmt and the command just won’t go through, try this option   -skip_rules

So I read a lot of Scott Lowe’s blog, and again he has the answer, but I needed just a bit more detail to make this work.  Since i’m using his blog as a starting point i’ll reference it here.  I also used this here from EMC

My Summary:

first, change the IP of the Celerra Manger, also known as the “control station”

Then change the IP of the SP’s with this command

/nasmcd/sbin/clariion_mgmt -start -spa_ip 128.221.ххх.ххх -spb_ip 128.221.ххх.ххх -use_proxy_arp

So a few things i’ll add

1) when using the clariion_mgmt tool, make sure to ssh as nasadmin, then su to root, if you ssh directly as root, the command might fail for you as it did for me with a “NAS_DB environment variable is not defined” message.

2) default passwords for nasadmin and root are “nasadmin”

3) when you setup a PPP connection to the Celerra or Clariion, do it this way:

Use the special EMC serial cable and the maintenance port on the back of the SP. Create a PPP dial up connection on your Windows laptop 115200 baud, HW flow control. Point a web browser to http://192.168.1.1/setup .

Username: clariion
Password: clariion!

They mean it.

For any of you thinking about building a new vCenter on a 64 bit OS so you can upgrade to 4.1, you should just export your database and import it on another machines. This is especially true if you use vDS's (vNetwork Distributed Switch), remember that these are stored on the vCenter and will continue to work on the ESX hosts, but will be difficult to modify/import/recreate on your new vCenter 4.1 server. To compound this difficult situation, if you are using iSCSI to reach your shared storage you will be in more deep stuff.

If you find yourself in this scenario, and you know what you named your previous vDS's, PortGroups, etc.. you may be able to recreate it without much difficulty. It gets more difficult when your using 8+ nic's per ESX Host. If you just need to start from scratch, it'll take a reboot or two of your ESX hosts (especially if you use EVC CPU masking) to get everything ripped out so you can start over again.