Autolab on VMware

I had been looking to set up a VMware lab for the longest. I purchased a rack mounted blade server, but it was too loud for the office. I decided to buy a beefed up laptop. 16 gig I7. Thus far I have used it to set up an instance of Debian, to study for Linux+, a small Rocks Cluster:

https://wiki.rocksclusters.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

And a CenTOS machine using VMware. But it was the VMware lab I wanted. I stumbled up AutoLab, from LabGuides:

http://www.labguides.com/autolab

Simply put, Autolab allows you set set up a nifty little VMware network, consisting of a router, a NAS, Domain Controller, Vsphere Center, and three EXSi host.

Closest JPEG I could find. So its missing an EXSi host.


The first step is to of course download the software and unzip it. This created a somewhat confusing directory tree. There are four different versions of AutoLab. One for VM Player, one for VM Workstation, and two for EXSi hosts. I may do an ExSi host later, but for now this is the workstation version. The download makes for provisions in case you want to upgrade from a earlier version of EXSi and provides a number of directories I didn't use. I will be using 5.5 and not interested in any of the other versions at this point. Later, I may try an upgrade, since I need to be able to do that if I want to get certified.

The NAS needs to be built first. Once built, the directory structure looks like this:

 total 229720
drwxrwxrwx   2 nobody  wheel   512B Sep 20  2012 VIM_50/
drwxrwxrwx   2 nobody  wheel   512B Sep 20  2012 VIM_41/
drwxrwxrwx   2 nobody  wheel   512B Sep 20  2012 View51/
drwxrwxrwx   2 nobody  wheel   512B Sep 20  2012 View50/
drwxrwxrwx   2 nobody  wheel   512B Sep 20  2012 VeeamBR/
drwxrwxrwx   2 nobody  wheel   512B Sep 20  2012 Veeam1/
drwxrwxrwx   2 nobody  wheel   512B Sep 20  2012 ESXi50/
drwxrwxrwx   2 nobody  wheel   512B Sep 20  2012 ESXi41/
drwxrwxrwx   2 nobody  wheel   512B Sep 20  2012 ESX41/
drwxrwxrwx   2 nobody  wheel   512B Sep 22  2012 VIM_51/
drwxr-xr-x   6 root    wheel   512B Oct  7  2012 ../
drwxrwxrwx   2 nobody  wheel   512B Nov 11  2012 vCD_15/
drwxrwxrwx   2 nobody  wheel   512B Nov 11  2012 vCD_51/
drwxrwxrwx   2 nobody  wheel   512B Jan  2  2013 ESXi51/
drwxrwxrwx  17 nobody  wheel   1.0K Oct  4  2013 Automate/
drwxrwxrwx   2 nobody  wheel   512B Oct 12  2013 View52/
drwxrwxrwx   2 nobody  wheel   512B Jan 15  2014 View53/
-rw-rw-rw-   1 nobody  wheel   2.8K Sep  2 00:51 ChangeLog.txt
drwxrwxrwx   2 nobody  wheel   512B Sep  2 11:44 View60/
drwxrwxrwx   3 nobody  wheel   512B Jan 31 08:53 VMTools/
-rw-rw-rw-   1 nobody  wheel   176M Jan 31 09:04 SQLManagementStudio_x64_ENU.exe
drwxrwxrwx   4 nobody  wheel   2.5K Jan 31 09:18 ESXi55/
-rw-rw-rw-   1 nobody  wheel    48M Jan 31 10:05 VMware-vSphere-CLI-5.1.0-780721.exe
drwxrwxrwx  22 root    wheel   512B Jan 31 10:06 ./
drwxrwxrwx  15 nobody  wheel   512B Jan 31 10:49 VIM_55/

Software Depot

http://modules.sourceforge.net

Prior to working here, if I installed some software built from source, and those binaries and libraries were located in a directory not in the user's path, I would have to change each user's path who wanted to use the software. Upon arriving at this job, I was exposed to 'Modules' for the first time. See a detailed description in the link above. Basically modules allows a user to change his or her PATH on the fly. Let's say the user need gcc-5.0.0, but the version of gcc in their path is 4.1.2. The way I have set up modules, the user executes:

module load gcc-5.0.0/gcc-5.0.0

Now if the user types:

which gccc

They get:

/software/depot/gcc-rhel6/bin/gcc

And their new PATH is:

/software/depot/gcc-rhel6/bin

And their LD_LIBRARY_PATH is:

/software/depot/gcc-rhel6/lib

/software/depot is an NFS mount from a Netapp's machine. I have built lots of software for RHEL5 and RHEL6 machines, both Intel and AMD and using the '--prefix' installed the software in this NFS mount. Depending of the machines a person is logged into, they see different modules. I have even installed a small number of packages that our CRAY users access. I simply mount the appropriate sub-drectory on the CRAY and create module files to point to it.