You will learn about the software requirements for every vSphere component covered in this book in their respective chapters, but to start with a basic lab setup, you will need at least two ESXi hosts, a vCenter Server, a Domain Controller, a DHCP server, a DNS server, and a TFTP Server. For learning purposes, you don't really need to run ESXi on physical machines. You can use VMware Workstation to set up a hosted lab on your desktop PC or laptop, provided the machine has adequate compute and storage resources.

For shared storage, you can use any of the following free virtual storage appliances:

• OpenFiler can be downloaded from https://www.openfiler.com.
• HP StoreVirtual VSA can be downloaded from http://www8.hp.com/in/en/products/data-storage/storevirtual.html.

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://static.packt-cdn.com/downloads/9781789953008_ColorImages.pdf.

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "Browse the ISO contents and navigate to the migration-assistant folder."

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

esxtop -b -a -d 10 -n 50 > /tmp/perf_statistics.csv

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "Specify an optional Name and Description and click Finish to create the Host Profile."