In one of the previous articles I did quick overview How-to Install vSphere Hypervisor ESXi 5 on VMware Workstation 9. One of the reasons I did that in my Lab environment was to run Cisco Nexus 1000v with NX-OS on it and evaluate this operating system and how it can integrate with other products. So, here is quick overview how to make Cisco Nexus 1000v happen on vSphere ESXi.

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VMware Wosktation allows to run ESXi as virtual machine (virtual environment as virtual machine – kind of funny). It can be very useful to evaluate, experiment and learn vSphere at home. This can be also very helpful if we want ot run virtual appliances which are compatible with ESX only. I will show how easy is to install ESXi 5 as virtual machine on VMware Workstation 9.

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VMware Workstation and GNS3 are two platforms which are very handy to test and evaluate solutions before live implementation. By default each of those platforms is separate, however both have components which allow integration. What that means is that it is possible to have virtual machines hosted on VMware Workstation to communicate with Cisco equipment which is running oin GNS3.

By default VMware Workstation has 10 virtual networks which are named VMnet0, VMnet1, … , VMnet9. Each of those networks can be used as:

• Bridged – virtual network connected seamless way to physical adapter. Virtual machines connected to bridged network will appear in same network as physical adapter connected to computer.
• NAT – VMware will translate virtual network and computers connected to that network and allow communication acting as gateway
• Host-only – network available only for virtual machines connected to it. private network for virtual machines.

Configuration of virtual networks is flexible and can be adjusted easily. Each of virtual networks can be also presented on host computer as network adapter.

In GNS3 environment we have Cloud Node Type which can be configured to communicate with any network adapter installed on the computer on which GNS3 is running

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Often using VMware Workstation platform we need to quickly create new virtual machine. reasons for that might be different. For example additional machine for our Lab environment or just quick test without affecting other machines we have setup in our virtual environment.

Installing whole operating system with all applications we used to have in our setup might be time consuming process. That is why it is worth to consider creating and using templates to be able quickly generate virtual machines we need.

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