photon-dfad9617 (1)If you are planning to use Photon Controller, understand the environment, it will operate in. With a multi tenant and distributed environment that it provides, the production environment can help it to be deployed for different hosts at differing scales and availability. The environment offers functional deployment at a minimal level with a Workstation or local Fusion hypervisor.

Goal of use

With the photon controller, you will be able to create a working environment which will allow you to test out controller functionality. However, you will be limited as to the number of VMs and clusters you can create. Installation is an opinionated process. Meta data have been seeded to minimize the steps that are part of the installation process. Network configurations as well as names that are predefined need to be used.

System requirements

You can use Photon OS with Mac or Windows where there is 16 GB RAM and available disk space about 50 GB. With less space than 16 GB RAM you would have to overcommit the memory to workstation or Fusion. The configuration file will be found at C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware Workstation\config.ini when you are using Workstation while Fusion will have a different path: /Library/Preferences/VMware\ Fusion/config

You can start work with VMWare Fusion 8 or VMware workstation 12 ESXi 6.0. The necessary command instructions are provided in the official guide document. If you wish to use them, it is recommended that you copy them into word and then paste the same in the command line.

Getting started with the evaluation version

You can download the evaluation version of VMware Fusion or Workstation which is available on the official site. There is a free trial license provided for the same. Deployment is done in a private network environment and it will be assumed that private network is being used in your end as well for Fusion or Workstation. When you download an evaluation version of ESXi 6.0 or Fusion 8 ESXi VM, you need to create an account for yourself. Creating a custom virtual machine would be the next step with VMware ESX. Check the settings, memory and processors before you proceed.

Installation steps

When you are about to install the Photon controller, you need to check the memory availability. It should be 16GB or more. With larger esxi host it would be possible to create more clusters. When ESXi starts to install you will need to have an OS admin password ready for your account.  Configure IP selects for a NAT network to the Virtual Network Editor. VMnet 8 needs to be configured to a subnet IP as provided in the instructions. For Workstation start with a New Virtual Machine, for installation, select the ESXi ISO you have downloaded and then select defaults like customizing hardware and setting VM memory. Select to store virtual disk as single file when it comes to specifying disk capacity. Once the installation is completed, reboot your system. Free versions will be on a trial basis for 60 days only and hence, it is best to opt for the full and the professional version of the software.

By Techwacky

Editor-in-Chef of TechWacky.com