Hello gurus, it`s pleasure to be part of this great community. I come here from networking world and small-business environments where duties are not so cleanly cut, and have been entitled a task of migrating our Oracle VM environment to vSphere 5. Im a fan of ESX since version 3, but I never really had a chance to be more envolved in the field. Time has come to dive in.
Unfortunatelly, there is not much time for warming up as we have to be up and running in a month. Except some basic consultation with our VMware partner prior the installation, Im practically put in fire cold. They wont be integrating it, but selling it, because we insisted on doing the integration on our own. There is a VCP5 training course in the region next month, but it`s too bit too late.
Now, I got myself some neat video tutorials following VCP5 syllabus, and from the point where I have all my ESXi hosts in vCenter, I can handle it. Reaching that point is kind of blurry to me. Hopefully you guys will be able to steer my in right direction, because all guide I`ve seen so far are installing ESX on one single host.
I have two datacenters, one primary and one failover. Primary site has IBM E series chassis with five blade servers, EMC FC storage, and Cisco network blades are port-aggregated to. Failover is a single rack IBM server with NAS storage attached.
What interests me the most regarding the installation is order. What is the suggested order of action when you install five blade ESXi hosts. What you do first, is there some check-list to make sure everything goes smooth, do I need to make sure some services are available during the install (DNS, NTS) even though all servers are down, etc.
Most of all, it`s being said vCenter is best to be a VM. Then I see ESXi being installed after vCenter is operational, and being added to the console. Now, this looks like a chicken-egg problem to me. Which came first for god sake? 
This is what concerns me the most. The rest is importing Oracle template, or "clones" of existing VMs into the vCenter, and what is I might be losing by doint this instead of installing fresh servers. You know, all the usual migration questions one might contemplate.
Any other resource that might help me in planning the whole process would be immensly appreciated!
Thank you guys and galls,
Milos