The Hardware behind the Book

Because of the specificity of the hardware for installing VMware vSphere 5, it can be difficult to build an environment in which you can learn by implementing the exercises and practices detailed in this book. It is possible to build a practice lab to follow along with the book; however, the lab will require specific hardware and might be quite costly. Be sure to read Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 before you attempt to construct any type of environment for development purposes.

For the purpose of writing this book, I used the following hardware configuration:

• Four Cisco UCS B200 blade servers connected to a pair of UCS 6120 fabric interconnects
• Four Dell PowerEdge R610 servers
• Several models of Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs) and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) converged network adapters (CNAs), including adapters from both QLogic and Emulex