Very quick blog entry as I’m busy tying up loose ends before jetting off on my summer hols….

It’s pretty easy to install vShield Endpoint as it’s a wizard-based OVA deployment. I’m not going to step through the process as it’s very simple (plus the install guide explains it very well). Once that’s done log into the console and run ‘setup’ to configure the IP address and DNS information.

After that, it’s a case of logging into vShield Manager and connecting to vCenter Server.

Once connected to the vCenter, you should see your datacenter and hosts in a hierarchical tree on the left menu. Select each host and installed vShield Endpoint.

vShield Installation guide: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vshield_55_install.pdf

However, I did encounter a few issues (due to prior deployments which hadn’t been cleaned up properly).

Error 1: VMKernel Portgroup present on incorrect vSwitch
This occurred because the hosts had a previous vSwitch labelled vmservice-vswitch, but the VMkernel port vmservice-vmknic-pg resided on a different vSwitch (previous deployment). To correct this I had to delete the old VMkernel port and recreate it on the correct vmservice-vswitch.

Error 2: VirtualMachine Portgroup present on incorrect vSwitch

Again this was due to a mis-configuration on a previous deployment! What should happen is once you’ve setup the vmservice-vswitch and created the vmservice-vmknic-pg portgroup and VMkernel port, the installer will create a new portgroup on that vSwitch called vmservice-vshield-pg. Like before, this was residing on the wrong vSwitch.

In the end I just deleted the wrong vSwitch and started again by creating the vmservice-vswitch and the vmservice-vmknic-pg. After that the installation of vShield Endpoint went swimmingly!

Which goes to show that cleaning up an old deployment within your demo environment can sometimes be very handy! =)