It is finally here, the long awaited AutoLab build with support for vSphere 5.5 is available for your downloading pleasure at the AutoLab home page.

The addition of v5.5 support is the headline item here, along with a fair bit of cleanup. The big change is that ESXi 5.5 wants 4GB of RAM before it will install, not a problem if you have 16GB of RAM in your physical machine, but those still using 8GB will need to reduce each ESXi VMs RAM to 2GB after it builds.

vSphere 5.5 brings VSAN, so there are now three ESXi VMs in the lab. Each is configured with three disks, one for boot, one tagged as SSD and the final as a normal disk. To get VSAN to configure you will need all three ESXi servers built & they will need their RAM increased to 6GB each (24GB physical required) but after that VSAN deploys normally.

I’ve also added support for View 5.2 & 5.3 since these have shipped since I started the new build. SRM support is a work in progress, you will find signs of the work in this build but it is still a little way off. The deployment guide has been reworked a little so it’s flow is a little clearer and formatted to be prettier than the eBook format I experimented with.

I have a laundry list of fixes and enhancements that I will add to AutoLab in the coming months. Big thanks to Infinio for their support which will enable me to take some time off to do this work. If you would like to contribute to AutoLab or have suggestions of ways to make it easier get in touch via alastair@vbrownbag.com or contact me on Twitter @DemitasseNZ.

Have fun.