VCAP and building an ESXi provisioning environment

So I'm starting down the VMware VCAP road, and I want to be thorough about it, because I've read the first hand reports of people who've sat the VCAP Datacenter Administration beta exam and it sounds tough.

Being thorough means a painstaking walk through the exam blueprint. And there's going to be lots to learn as the VCAP isn't just about basic vCenter and the vSphere hypervisor any more, and that means spending time with Orchestrator, vShield Zones, the PowerCLI and much more besides; stuff which I haven't had a need to explore up to now.

But the best place for me to start is with ESXi 4.1, or as it now seems to be called (according to the download), VMvisor. Partly this is because up to now all of my VMware hypervisor work has been with ESX, console operating system and all, and that's for historical reasons (I've been doing this since before ESXi existed). But mostly it's because vSphere 4.1 is the last time we'll see the ESX service console as all future versions will be ESXi only.

Now, in the interests of making life easy for myself, I've built a simple provisioning environment to take advantage of the new scripted install mode in ESXi 4.1. This means I can have a central repository of build and configure scripts and spin up an arbitrarily complex ESXi test lab at the push of a couple of PXE-capable network-card buttons. This is a Good Thing™ because each task/step in the exam blueprint isn't necessarily going to be feature-compatible with the preceding or subsequent steps so being able to tear down and rebuild a lab repeatably and consistently is going to prove essential.

I'm building my ESXi lab on top of ESXi itself. Each 4GB physical host will house at least two 2GB ESXi systems. I'm doing that because it lets me take advantage of memory over-provisioning since I don't have the budget for more than 4GB per host, and I can have as many virtual network cards per virtual-ESXi as I need. Throw in a few Linux VMs as routers and I've got a WAN in a box as well. There'll be more about the lab architecture later.

The test lab doesn't have to be fast, it just has to work - so I don't mind so much if I end up swapping with the virtual-ESXi guests.

Anyway, that's the precis. The build environment comes next.