System information

A Principled Technologies test report 22
Comparing performance and cost: Dell PowerEdge VRTX vs.
legacy hardware solution
3. Click Storage, and click Add Storage…
4. Choose Disk/LUN.
5. Select the disk, and click Next.
6. Accept the default of VMFS-5 for the file system.
7. Review the disk layout, and click Next.
8. Enter the datastore name, and click Next.
9. Accept the default of using maximum capacity, and click Next.
10. Click Finish.
11. Repeat for the additional volumes.
12. Add shared storage on the second host:
a. On the second host, click the Configuration tab.
b. Click the Storage menu.
c. The new storage should appear automatically. If no storage is listed, click Rescan All…
d. Click OK to rescan all adapters. The shared storage will appear automatically with the name VRTX-
shared-01 already configured.
Setting up a high availability cluster
1. Right-click the VRTX-01 Datacenter.
2. Select New Cluster.
3. Name the cluster. For our testing, we used VRTX-01-C1.
4. Check the Turn On vSphere HA checkbox, and click Next.
5. Accept all vSphere HA defaults, and click Next.
6. Accept Virtual Machine Options defaults, and click Next.
7. Accept VM Monitoring defaults, and click Next.
8. Accept VMware EVC defaults, and click Next.
9. Accept VM Swapfile Location defaults, and click Next.
10. To create the cluster, click Finish.
11. Click and drag each ESXi host into the cluster to populate it.
Creating the first VM
1. Connect to the vCenter Server.
2. Right-click the cluster, and choose New Virtual Machine.
3. Choose Custom, and click Next.
4. Assign a name to the virtual machine, and click Next.
5. Select the Microsoft Exchange (1.1TB) Datastore on the external storage, and click Next.
6. Choose Virtual Machine Version 8, and click Next.
7. Choose Windows, select Microsoft Windows Server 2012 (64-bit), and click Next.
8. Choose 1 virtual socket, and 4 virtual processors per core, and click Next.
9. Choose 8GB RAM, and click Next.
10. Click 1 for the number of NICs, select vmxnet3, and click Next.
11. Leave the default virtual storage controller, and click Next.
12. Choose to create a new virtual disk, and click Next.
13. Make the OS virtual disk size 40 GB, and choose thick-provisioned lazy zeroed.