If done properly, you should be able to reproduce the training environment and run the labs from the VMware courses you take. It’s even possible to do advanced configurations, such as VMware View designs and SRM inside VMs hosted on a single host. Select hardware powerful enough to run ESXi as a VM and (as I said in part one) remember that you’ll probably want more than 4 cores or at least hyperthreading on the 4 cores, 12 to 16 GB of RAM, and x64 CPUs with Intel-VT or AMD-V support and enabled in the BIOS. In this post, I’ll cover more hardware, VMware Workstation configuration, and the installation of vSphere and Virtual Center (VC).

The DRS feature is a little more advanced than HA but, for all but the smallest environments, no less important, as performance across many VMs in a dynamic environment is an ever-present concern and one that could easily consume one or more administrators’ full time without it. Leverage DRS for an environment that will run as smoothly as possible.

VMware has a popular and powerful virtualization suite of products in the vSphere and vCenter family of products. This post focuses on ten of the biggest mistakes people make when configuring the High Availability (HA) and Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) features. We’ll begin by looking at five common HA issues, then we’ll look at four common DRS issues, then conclude with an issue that affects both HA and DRS.