VMware vSphere

This project focuses on building a functional VMware vSphere environment in a controlled lab setup using three physical servers connected on the same local wireless network. The goal is to simulate an enterprise-grade virtualization infrastructure that demonstrates key VMware technologies, including ESXi, vCenter Server, shared storage, and advanced features such as vMotion, High Availability (HA), Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), and Fault Tolerance (FT).

Two servers are configured as ESXi hypervisors, each hosting virtual machines and participating in a centralized cluster managed through vCenter Server.

The vCenter Server is deployed as a virtual appliance on one of the ESXi hosts to provide unified management of the environment. The third server hosts a Windows Server configured with an NFS shared datastore, enabling centralized storage accessible to both ESXi hosts for VM deployment, migration, and resilience testing.

The networking design uses standard vSwitches with dedicated port groups for management, vMotion, storage, and VM traffic. A content library is created to manage ISO files and templates for efficient provisioning. Virtual machines are deployed from this library, and operations such as cloning, snapshots, and template creation are performed to validate lifecycle management.