Remote Lab Instructions
This page is for customers who purchased our 7-day remote lab rental offer that includes our independent study Lab Guide book. On this page, you will find everything you need to access your labs. If you ever need help accessing the labs, please review the Questions and Support section at the bottom of this page.
Step 1 - Connect to and Use our Remote Labs
The e-mail we send you that contains all of the information needed to access your remote lab environment. It will include an attachment called Lab Access - <your name>, and will include:
- Your remote lab user name
- Your remote lab password
- The Fully Qualified Name and non-standard port you will use to MS Terminal Services access your server
Your lab configuration consists of the following components:
- One Windows Server 2003 VM that you use for remote access. You will access this VM via MS Terminal Services (with a connection string like pod__.esxlab.com:2001)
- Two physical ESXi hosts that are accessible to you only from the (above) remote access VM.
Please start with the Lab Access document you received by e-mail. This document provides your user name, password and MS Terminal Services machine IP address and port number (IP:port).
Next, go to Lab 1 in the Lab Guide book and follow the instructions. Lab 1 tells you how to:
- Connect to the remote lab environment
- Log in to your remote access server
- Launch HP's Integrated Lights Out remote management service; and log in
- Power on your ESXi hosts
- Open a Console on your ESXi hosts and initiate the installation of ESXi
Step 2 - Run Through the Labs
Once you make it to this step... you are ready to go. Here are a couple of things to keep in mind when you work with our labs
*Very Important* - IP Address Calculation Within the Server Pod
We use a simple notation intended to allow you to easily calculate the correct IP addresses for your assigned servers and services. This formula is based on the remote access VM and server number(s) assigned to you. The notation is IP+offset... where specific IP addresses are determined by adding the offset to the last octet of a base IP address.
For example, suppose you were assigned to use physical server numbers 1 and 2 in our pod:
- Your unique Server Numbers are 1, and 2
- You would remote into the first server. If you were assigned to use servers in pod 5, your MS Terminal Services connection string may be: pod5.esxlab.com:200+# (where # is your first server #) which becomes pod5.esxlab.com:2001
- To power on your assigned physical servers we use HP Integrated Lights Out remote management cards. The HP ILO port of your servers are 192.168.20.20+# (where + means add, and where # is your assigned server number). This means that the actual ILO IP address for Server 1 is 192.168.20.21 and the ILO IP address for Server 2 is 192.168.20.22, etc.
- The Lab Guide will tell you to set the ESXi Management IP for Server 1 to 192.168.20.50+#. Again, + means add, and # is your Server number. for Server 1, the actual IP is 192.168.20.50+# which is 192.168.20.51. For Server 2, the IP you should use is 192.168.20.52
- If you are assigned servers 11 and 12, then your ILO ports are 192.168.20.20+11 which is 192.168.20.31 and 192.168.20.20+12 which is 192.168.20.32
Things to Keep In Mind While Doing The Labs
You were provisioned with:
- One remote access server (to be used as your vCenter server)
- Two physical servers to be used as ESXi hosts
Because you have two ESXi hosts, you get to do many of the labs twice! This is actually a benefit as doing the labs a 2nd time, on your 2nd machine significantly improves familiarization and helps reinforce the mechanics of the labs...You must install ESXi onto both machines. You must create the same vSwitch configurations on both ESXi hosts, same NFS configurations, install the same Software iSCSI Adapter, etc. or your future VMotion, High Availability and Distributed Resource Scheduling labs won't work. Please follow the guidelines (below) very carefully when completing your labs.
Please proceed through the labs as follows:
- Labs 2, 3, 4. Do these labs on both ESXi hosts
- Labs 5. Do this lab on your first ESXi host only
- Lab 6. Do this lab on your Windows remote access VM
- Lab 7.1 through Lab 7.6 Do this lab on your first ESXi host only
- Lab 8. Do this lab on your Windows remote access VM
- Lab 9. Do this lab on both ESXi hosts
- Lab 10. Do this lab on any one of your ESXi hosts
- Lab 11. Do this lab on your Windows remote access VM
- Lab 12. Do this lab once on your Windows remote access VM
- Lab 13. Do this lab on your first ESXi host
- Lab 14. Import a VM onto your first ESXi host
- Lab 15. Install Data Recovery onto your Windows remote access VM
- Lab 16. Add your second ESXi host to your vCenter server. Skip the steps in Part 2 where you remove your 2nd ESXi host from vCenter (as it was never added to vCenter so it doesn't have to be removed from vCenter)
- Lab 17-19. Do these labs once on your Windows remote access vCenter remote access VM
- Lab 20. Do this lab on VMs that belong to one of your ESXi hosts
- Lab 22-23. Do these labs on your Windows remote access vCenter VM
Questions and Support
If you have any questions or need support, please open a trouble ticket by visiting helpdesk.esxlab.com. You will need to create an account before you can create a trouble ticket. Trouble tickets are answered within 4 hours but only between the hours of 9-5 Eastern time.
Thank you for purchasing our vSphere 5 Complete Lab Guide and renting time on our server farm.
Sincerely
All the friendly techs here at ESXLab.com