Here at VMworld 2014, one of the hands on labs was the new EVO:Rail.  The lab walks through the process of the installation and then creating some VMs and managing them.

 Installation Overview:

• Connect to the IP of the EVO:Rail cluster to start the installation process.

• Choose to customize the installation to assign IP addresses and passwords.

• Assign hostnames:
  • Host prefix
  • Separator
  • Iterator
  • TLD
• These settings will build the fqdn of each host – in the example we will receive 4 hosts named:
  • host01.localdomain.local
  • host02.localdomain.local
  • host03.localdomain.local
  • host04.localdomain.local
• Configure the name of the vCenter server.

• Configure the networking settings for the hosts.  The 4 hosts (and future hosts) will get IPs assigned from this pool of IP addresses.

• Configure the IP addresses to be assigned to the vMotion interfaces for each host and VLAN ID.

• Configure the IP pool for the Virtual SAN interfaces and VLAN ID.

• Configure the vCenter server IP.

• Finally for networking, create any needed VM networks and associated VLAN IDs.

• Assign passwords (Not pictured).  Assign the ESXi root password and also the vCenter password.

• Setup NTP servers and the time zone.  Also, you have your choice of logging servers:
  • vCenter Log Insight is included in EVO:Rail
  • 3rd party logging solution

• Click Validate and then install – and EVO:Rail will deploy everything for you! (about 10 minutes)

• Congratulations!  You have installed EVO:Rail, and are ready to deploy some VMs.