How to build your awesome virtualization home lab with VMware vSphere 6.0 (ESXi & vCSA)

I am very happy to demonstrate for you now how to create your own vSphere 6 lab specifically you'll be downloading all the three pieces of code you need you get your hypervisor here you got your these for your client here Windows installer and then finally have this large I so that's the VCS a appliance or vCenter server appliance those three pieces are what make up your vSphere 6 home lab coupled with in my case a core i7 server with 32 gig of ram now you can get started with downloading these three files of course my article has the links and how to get those three files and we're also going to need a tool called Rufus at this URL on my site tanker truck um I also have an article that walks you through Rufus but I'm going to show you right now what to do Rufus is going to create the bootable media on a USB flash drive that's going to become where we install ESXi to I'm going to download rufus 2.1 portable I'm going to save it right where we have these other files so in this particular fresh Windows 8 one system I made a directory called VCR 6.0 so we now have Rufus downloaded another tool that's going to be very handy for the process of installing and configuring your vSphere 6 data center will be putty it's been around for well over a decade at that same URL so all we really need is buddy and all we need is a Windows version as an exe no install needed and I've saved led to the same folder keeping this video as simple as possible and uncluttered as possible I'm now done with the browser what is next running Rufus say yes to user access control and say no I don't need it to check for application updates every time we launch it ok this is the simple Rufus user interface now a couple things to point out one we even told it what I so to stick on a USB flash drive and two we have any in stuck in a USB flash drive so in my case I'm sticking in a SanDisk USB 3 o 16 gig Drive for all of $10 on Amazon inserting it now [Music] so now that it sees a 16 gig drive we're ready to point to the ISO file so let me point out right here is the button we need click to select an image and it's the hypervisor this one that we want the smaller ISO file ok the settings in the screen are important MBR partition scheme for bios UEFI computers we're going to leave that alone fat cluster size all the rest should look like this on your screen before you click the start button now the very first time you run Rufus it needs to download another piece from the internet so another files going to go right into that directory at the bottom and then it's warning me it's going to obliterate nuke destroy all the contents of this USB flash drive so make sure you know what you're doing ok now we just wait for it to complete and there you have it have finished on all of 22 seconds there we're done with Rufus so I'm going to close the Rufus UI it's always wise to properly eject the media now I'm ready to power up the server with the USB flash drive in place and in my case with ESXi 6 we don't really get the USB 3 speeds for the hypervisor itself so you could really pick a USB 2 slot or USB 2 socket on your motherboard so I am ready to proceed USB flash drive is in the server and I've powered on the server now and what you're looking at you can think of as like a video camera aimed at the server screen it's called keyboard video mouse over IP and it's going to let me show you my machine powering on so in my case I'm going to hit delete to get into setup so in my particular motherboard that's the hotkey to hit to get into the setup routine again I want to point out here local VGA keyboard mouse keyboard reading Wales KVM is almost useless after you install the hypervisor you don't run Windows or any operating system from the locally attached keyboard video mouse on your hypervisor your ESXi server it's largely meant to be headless so it's going to point that out and again think of this window this LAN Tronics KVM console as a camcorder aimed at the monitor of the ESXi host alright good way to think of it now what do we have here well like I said it's a core i7 and I want to show you the settings that are pertinent or could be pertinent on your motherboard they're going to obviously look different you're going to find things in different places but under CPU configuration in general you're going to want Intel virtualization technology turned on and no execute memory protection enabled especially that's second one if you don't have that on it won't even let you install ok just just point that out so my case those were on already hyper threading on as well I'm going to go right over to storage that's the next piece that's relevant and it says USB SanDisk right at the top of my boot list so I already have USB at the top of the boot list and and that's it let's table that so one item I don't want to boot off of any hard drives of just want to boot off the USB flash drive I inserted okay as far as USB you may need to go to legacy mode or boot from legacy mode so again way out of scope to try to cover every possible motherboard option out there so I'm going to go ahead and save changes and exit and show you how straightforward installing ESXi 6 dotto is configuring takes longer but the actual installation is very straightforward you okay I sped up that psycho in a video bit and now I'm ready to simply hit enter and f11 to accept and continue now it's scanning for potential install targets or local drives and the one that's highlighted in yellow is the SanDisk Ultra Fit that we just booted from and that's definitely where I want to install I don't want to go putting on one of those SSDs you see they're listed or my raid array so I simply hit enter to confirm the one it chose you want to be very careful in that step it's warning me you're about to it's about to overwrite all data on that device I hit enter again us keyboard in my case I'm using password of the capital P and zero instead of an L in the word and an exclamation at the end that makes it happy yes excited isn't care so much about coming up with the VCS a appliance it wants a complex password so we can use that universally throughout this home lab installation I'll be showing you ready to hit enter and one last confirmation telling me that this disk will be repartition hit f11 and then just wait okay on this screen it thinks you're usually using an ISO burn to a CD or DVD well that's not us we actually leave our media inserted this is an extra nice piece of using a flash drive you don't have to worry about a DVD or CD ejecting out the front of your server or hitting a closed door or whatnot so I hit enter and it starts rebooting let's be the section up again you excellent now I'm ready to configure the hypervisor so you can see the version shown at the top dot processor but I want to bring your attention to the bottom left corner hitting f2 to customize it then prompts me to type in the password that we chose earlier and I'm now in down arrow to configure management network that's what I want to do it lets me list all network adapters it found I'll stick with the one VM NIC zero that it's found first and just down arrow my way to ipv4 and hit enter again instead of dynamic I'm going to go with static like you usually do for a server and before I choose 50 I'm going to show you remind you that always a good idea to ping first make sure that IP address really is available okay so I'm going to mask and Gateway look good as is because DHCP is where it got those guesses from simply hit enter how about DNS ty down there and notice it hard-coded that and again it's guessing based on what the DHCP server gave it before but I do want to change the host name [Music] finally domain name suffix I don't like that one so much so I'm going to call it that lab local that's important to note dot local alone can get some trouble with a Apple devices on the network Bonjour so I'm going to stick with dot lab dot local so my machines called ESXi not five five or 600 or any of that because I wanna be able to upgrade right so ESXi his name of my server dot lab dot local is the full name go ahead escape at this point and it's going to say do you want to apply the changes say Y for yes wait a moment can now I want to test so going to down arrow twice go to test management network and simply hit enter alright so naturally if you don't have full forward reverse lookup fully qualified domains in your home lab which is pretty typical for a home router you're going to get an error when it tries to do the full hostname that's okay so this hypervisor is now ready now do you remember I mentioned it's largely headless so that's really it for the local console just get that out of our way and we did download putty you might remember so I'm going to launch putty at this time now how will putty see this hypervisor well let's teach it the hostname so again I don't want to assume anything about your Wi-Fi router that you've in your home right click here Windows 8 one command prompt as admin say yes back up the hosts file first now I'm going to edit it okay while we're in there we're going to do another line that looks like that for V Center that we're about to do next so now when we ping ESXi we see a return for the IP address we set we're done with that command line command prompt window so we can save a session and now we can just next time we run it just click on ESXi so network connection refused that's expected why is that well you need to install VMware VI client to see now if you forgot to download that you're offered that here as well let me show you download vSphere client for Windows notice the bottom left corner the URL it's the same code over to download VI client all six out of six Oh exe so different file name when it comes inside the bundle vs. download from the site for the size of the same and doing a file compare it's the same so I'm going to just double click the VI client and now install that and wait for it this is how we're going to log into the hypervisor that we just created and check in that things look good you won't be using it much longer this is sick so maybe by 6 1 you won't need it at all really I like to just double check the health hypervisor before I move on to the server appliance if you've never done this before I'll just point out that the vmware vi client we're doing this windows installer that's what goes back for many years so sis admins that I've been playing with VMware for a long time will know this user interface the web interface though is the way things are moving forward I'm going to be showing you that coming up after we get the appliance installed so I'm gonna pick English next except next default directory is fine next and install and simply wait I'll speed this up that's done we click finish and I usually right-click and pin it to my taskbar right there and I can tell you the desktop icon all right so we're ready to launch install the certificate and do not display a warning okay and ignore so the next time I won't have that pop-up and wait for a login to happen and we're in we have 60 days in this trial now what's next why am I in here click on inventory and now you see this thing called an ESXi house that we created and there's the fully qualified name there because the DGP server is feeding it rit oksana that's what it keeps going but we can clean that up in a minute next thing i'm going to do is get ssh working how do we do that i'm going to go to this configuration tab security profile properties ssh options start it and then for the next time around after a reboot start and stop with host which means server click OK and click ok so you may remember the reason I wanted to do this because putty wasn't working right so now let's try putty again a fire putty again this time we should be able to get into the ESXi host say yes there's no email excuse me you have to use VI or you could use something like mine SCP if you really really want to gooey alright notice it went and named it ignoring me saying lab dot local it went named it what my home Wi-Fi router insists on sending out as a fully qualified name let's compare DNS is really important in vSphere six properties so what it's done is put in an order that we don't really like necessarily and up here do the same thing so let's clean it up so one of me about ipv6 which I'm not worried about are really doing anything with all right now we've got a proper name now let's see what changed over here so in VI what do you do when you want to get out you hit escape you hit colon and quit so now if we hit type cat hosts we can see the contents notice the new contents I didn't I did I didn't do right quit I just did acquit so we configured the way we wanted ESXi dot allowed our local also known as the ESXi so the host is done but you know what we're here and we've got the ability to add V Center as well again I'm in a home lab I don't really want to necessarily have a full active directory or Windows server running just to run domain name services with forward reverse look up you can just week host files as you see me do before my ESXi five five video so I've opened VI I move my arrow around when we get to the end you want to hit the insert key now I can move right arrow and get to the lat end of the last text that's there hit enter and start typing tab space enter okay escape : w q and then cat host and you'll see we successfully made the changes and they stuck they've been saved this is good what's next back over here a couple things you're going to get warnings about leaving putty running you get this yellow bar it'll show up in your face it'll annoy you so I'm going to jump right to advanced settings trying to give you a little spit in polish and go to user bars and scroll to the bottom and suppress shell warnings change that to a 1 and click okay that's done next time time configuration right here properties alright it looks like the clock is awfully close but still I'm going to enable NTP click on options and TP settings ad or you could use like your local internet providers ntp source if you want click ok restart ntp to apply this change we just made click OK again you can see stuff happening at the bottom now what happens well we want to go back into options to see this is running yeah that's nice but what about after restarting the house so we wanted to start and stop with the host and then click OK it's going to be very careful get your ntp right this is our ntp server it's going to be our ntp server for our VCS a appliance coming up to so now we know we have a good clock with correct time I see a bit of drift here so that should be resolved soon ready to move on to the next piece I'm going to make Chrome my default [Music] you you of course you can use firefox as well but chrome is an app handy application pending option that I'm going to show you that really comes in handy later on with the vSphere client all right so chrome is there partly to help us get ready for the next steps which involve deploying the appliance now one of the prerequisites for the appliance is browser integration so let me show you where we started with three files here's the giant one if you're on Windows 8 1 or 8 you can simply double click on ISO and it's going to mount the drive letter and just show you the contents it's that easy suddenly we have a drive here and we have contents we have a readme that tells us the folder layout let me show you what's inside here client integration plug-in you need that before the browsers will know what to do with the Installer we're about to run so this is a prerequisite what we're doing here is now jumping to getting ready for a web client to function so this Eclipse are installed browsers with the ability to run our vSphere data center basically our home lab up a level and we have this thing called VCS a set up a CH tml when we we click on VCS a set up at HTML it's going to say what application you want to use for each 2-mile in the future we'll say chrome and there it is step one it says please install the client we did already so that means this next thing is going to pop up just this one time remember my choice and launch your application and now we have an install wizard so this is a new approach if you're used to the ESXi 5/5 or earlier installing this VCS a appliance was a very different procedure it's now this web-based procedure click install accept the terms of the license agreement and click Next yes ex I root and the password we set up earlier so let's say in connect a target server we're giving it what it wants those parameters click Next and for the certificate warning just say yes next screen item three set up a virtual machine this is an arbitrary name it's the name it's going to be in inventory it's generally something like V Center so this appliance this first virtual machine in our new data center is going to be called V Center I went with the same password as I use for the ESXi host not a great idea to do in production or this is a lab but everything will function fine okay platform services do you need to know about this not really if you're new to this you can just hit next you're getting everything embedded we're not pointing to some external one which would be more complicated we're going to create a new SSO doing which is single sign-on and we can use the same password now a third time if we like SSO domain name what is this you can just type the sample one the suggestion try and keep this video simple just type what it says there it's fine you're not going to have multiple ones in your home lab likely apply in size I'm going to leave this alone 100 VMs is a huge number to have in a home lab so keeping it light on the memory footprint it's going to choose 8 you can strip it down to 6 safely later on for how much memory this appliance will use from your hopefully fairly beefy core i7 maybe 16 gig around would be a good starting point maybe a Mac Mini or something but lower than that you can be hurting because this appliance is going to take 6 gig minimum ok next a datastore now I want to point out if you get to the step and you've never installed the m-word for you're not going to see anything here so here's the fix remember this vSphere client try not to show you too much in there because you don't need it much anymore but you may need to go to storage and click on add storage and next and it'll find a drive if you have one install like an SSD a blank one ideally or blank six terabyte hard drive and you click on it and say next and it'll say hey do you want to let me format it and those other contents on it is VMFS filesystem it's called just like you have NTFS for your Windows box you say yes and give it a name and you're done so that's the wizard I don't have any blank tests at the moment so I'm sorry I'm not showing you that but there's plenty of documentation on that adding storage so in my case I already have storage I'm good to go so back to this Web Wizard I'm going to pick my fastest for the appliance the appliance is used for all sysadmin and that's what I do a lot of in my home lab so I want it to be fast I'm putting on a SATA 3 connected a newer SSD of mine that has 81 gig available which is more than enough I'm also going to make sure I turn on enable thin disk mode that'll make it so this VM only uses up as much space as it really needs that's really important to do nm SSD I believe is under 20 gigs even under 10k it doesn't use much by default now we click Next embedded database is fine next ok and here we have to pause and really think for a bit okay I need to trick my home router to cooperating so this chapter I might come up with a better more elegant way later on we could do scripted installs but I think most people really kind of want to see how do you do a quick installer next next install so vast majority of the videos and screenshots that scene out there say hey they chickened out in a home lab they just type in a hard-coded IP address I don't want to do that I want my appliance called vCenter so how am I going to do that well follow along here keep it a little simple use internet explorer to log into my home router and my home router has a feature I need to do this successfully you may have a different story you may have a different kind of DTP server or a home router but the capability we're looking at is a DHCP reservation table we're going to want to give a name when DHCP asks for a certain MAC address we're going to want to give it the name V Center so this appliance is very picky this wizard we're going through this line right here they're not kidding having this working is essential it's going to be issuing certificates doing all kinds of stuff you want to have the IP address and host name fully qualified and all work done advanced so that's what we're doing we're going to our home consumer e Wi-Fi router remember that fully qualified domain name stuff wears a Cox net kept insisting on that I can fix that I got to find out what my current IP is report there now I have all my internet settings grab a quick screenshot of that so what I'm going to do is temporarily hard code the LAN interface of my home router why the heck would I do that let's just start to become clear as I get further along so I'm going to go back to connectivity Internet settings edit and change it to a static IP on the LAN interface can't leave it like this it's not a great idea but what it does is gets this out of being gray and it lets me get this appliance installed it's kind of a hack but it works many brand brands of routers can support this so I wish I came up with a DHCP server like a piece of freeware you can download for Windows and we have the same functionality I couldn't find one so find the I'm making this video hours before I'm flying away actually that's why it's wicked late and I would leave my lab and it could stay before I go on a trip here so I'm ready to go to so no mask you okay so now in DTP grants leases to local devices they don't get that weird fully qualified domain name important via plants didn't really matter for the ESXi host because I show you how to fixed it but for the VCS appliance everything is now going to work which is which is cool so we're waiting for the router to become responsive again okay the next thing we're going to do is get them out of our way and deploy the s-- appliance and see if we can sneak in quick enough to get a MAC address reservation going we may have to deploy the appliance again if we don't that's okay doesn't really take the longest push on an SSD in my case dhv i'm going to leave this blank because the DHCP server is going to feed that out to it I'm going to synchronize since we have our ESXi server with a proper clock I'm going to synchronize this virtual machine the supply its to it and finally enabling SSH is very handy saw me and why that's useful earlier here it warns me about DCP I'm hitting finish now the Wizards running okay over here we can bring this Windows plus right-arrow key size at the half of the screen and you're going to see a virtual machine is shown up go to summary and it's not running yet it's powered on so all this is important what I want to be ready to do is click on edit settings when it starts powering up and make a DHCP reservation at that point all we need to do is paste in the MAC address as soon as we know it so when this shows powered on that means the VM is done being provisioned down here you can see status of that and there you go it's powered on now so I hit edit settings highlight the network adapter and then just start typing the MAC address David and the router is now feeding out that MAC address cancel this I didn't change anything is it the console boots on this appliance we just created if I hit escape you can look under the hood of it you don't have to a little scary under there but you can if you want when it comes up further and it's further along in the boot it'll show the IP address here interesting it still shows dot all right on out there it's a little odd and we got the wrong IP not the friendliest thing to do but I'm powering it off because I couldn't I couldn't reliably come up with a way to show you any other procedure that would work every time so forcibly powered off right-click delete from disk otherwise you try to deploy it again it says it already exists so the wizard on the left is now going to be toast and we just do it again you you okay what you're seeing here on the right is the correct IP address now 51 and the fully qualified name vCenter lab dot local so basically that's that was our goal to get it to look like that the appliance now is configured correctly and it's it's certificates and all its built-in stuff it's doing actually I can show you in the console here we'll all be nice and proper normally this is hidden from you unless you hit escape so the sequence will be let's tweak the host file of the vCenter appliance we can add the ESXi host to its inventory and then we'll say hey sxi if you were to reboot make sure you restart this vCenter appliance automatically and then I'll go ahead and reboot I want to make sure that DNS and the user interface and everything looks clean after that reboot then I'll have that confidence that this lab and beginning to build here is in good shape I temporarily setup my Wi-Fi routers and so would be a DHCP server that would feed out a fully qualified name those are all important steps I'll be leaving the DHCP reservation there but I will be removing that hard-coded manual IP address on the way on interface I doubt Cox internet would like that and I noticed it disables it after a few hours so I do not want to leave the internet like that needs to be DHCP on the way on interface for most people's cable modem situations in a residential setting you you excellent success remember I said I want to test login but before that I want to get my router back and my home back to normal so internet settings type of internet connection back on automatic click apply and let that thing where you boot or restart or do whatever it's doing put this in your clipboard administrator vSphere local copy and then click the link to open ok bypass the warning about the certificate proceed and right click paste so you how much less typing and you can use LastPass or something I'll Auto populate that for you if you feel like it later click login we're now about to see the function of suppliants for the first time you seems to be behaving normally I don't want to forget the host file let's go ahead and handle that actually we are done with this right we're done with the whole install so one good thing to keep in mind is to eject media when you're done with them right so I don't really need that drive e mounted anymore that big iso mounted we don't need that window open anymore either and internet connection to HP yep we don't need that open anywhere either it's healthy and rebooted what do we need potty so we have that buddy session open can right click and let's set up another one save it now just double click it yes all right so how we can do a side-by-side comparison right there's cat Oh host we're trying to do that on the right but before we can do that it's making us type some stuff to get to a bash shell so I have to type this and there's a permanent fix so that you have to do this every time that interest you I'll follow up with some of that spit and polish at a later time okay launch bash shell is simply by typing there you go I can see my hosts file is lacking let's fix it but it does look good from a fully qualified name perspective VI hosts nice so remember what we do we move the cursor to where we're going to be adding stuff hit insert move to the right one now I can hit on our 10.10 1.50 tab about two spaces there we go sxi to lab local ESXi and then move to the end i hit enter i want to have and taking a careful look does it look exactly like on the left for those two lines other than ESXi seems to use tab for a delimiter and the Appliance seem to use two spaces for the delimiter whatever it's the same host file the two lines them care about our 1551 so it looks done to me so i hit escape I hit : I hit WQ and then I cat it and now I've got a side by side where things look good okay the host file set the router is back to normal we have a working VC our web client it's time to show you how to configure the host and the very first step notice I where I was the vSphere web client you can't see the host you can't see the server all you have is this thing this be centered I live at local appliance that says hey click here to create a data center so let's do that now we've click gotten one of those we click on it and you typically might have your location like for me Connecticut or something ok add host that sounds promising go pass the licensing lockdown mode go past a location just the next next X install so we edited the host file so that VCS a appliance would know how to find ESXi host by name rather than ugly IP address so now we have a UI that looks exactly how I wanted my home lab to look it was pretty easy to do this in five five they made it way harder on sick so I don't have to reuse your certificates I don't have to do anything sloppy a third-party backup software why not should have any problems with this I wouldn't recommend it for production what we've done here but we're good to go we can have a library of virtual machines now we've got an ESXi host and I told you before forgetting to make sure I wouldn't forget I want to reboot make sure everything comes up clean so we go to the ESXi host click on manage and right here VMs VM startup and shutdown sounds really promising to me click Edit automatically start and stop the virtual machines with the system yes home lab 15 seconds plenty most of my VMs that's fine and shutdown so value like 10 EMS I don't really want to wait around 20-30 minutes in a home environment also when they start up if vmware tools' loads why not just load the next V my wait ok shut down action very important by default it'll just abruptly like pull the power cord on your VMs I don't like that very much I wanted to do a graceful shutdown guest shutdown and then finally V Center highlight it hit the up arrow and now it's in the automatic startup group and I'm going to click OK right click on the most power reboot so you may remember we have this ability to watch even a reboot and if we look at the bottom here I'll bring that up later when it's actually rebooting I'm going to put this in the right I'm going to put the this on the Left you'll see something's happening with UI there you go it's shutting down says initiate gets shut down of the vCenter appliance ok and then when so on the right the web client is probably become unresponsive yep and then now it's rebooting it's not the cleanest VMware's done that for years when it dies like that gets some weird errors alright video and blank NES X is now going to come back up so some things to point out we have not tested moving files in and out of data stores on hosts that would be important to make sure our web is working our web client and we also haven't created a shortcut for the web client so I'll show you that a shortcut being a way the web browser doesn't waste space with this URL line it'll look like an application rather than a web browser that's what we want for a dedicated you know green button that'll sit here in the tray we want to be able to start the vSphere web client nice and easily so done with that time that worked that tap too and this is going to be a bad login at this point we can close that as well and we're actually done with VMware vSphere client we don't need this UI anymore for much of anything unless you want to use it I will point out that you can log into the vCenter appliance we just created with this vSphere client but with version 6 one or some later version they've been threatening it for years you probably won't be able to anymore they really are trying to push hard towards the web client rebooting does take a while I'm going to take a little break but it tends to take five seven eight minutes before your web browser can actually get to the login page even after the server itself is booted now in our case VMware has come up yes Excel hypervisor but the VCS a appliance now needs to come up and we can actually watch that at the bottom power and virtual machine vCenter completed so the auto power on sequence is working notice the nice names sweet and simple self-evident it's very obvious what you're looking at if we go to the summary tab the ESXi host i want to look at its configuration networking dns excuse me dot lab dot local so what we set up stuck and it remained after a reboot so that's good how about V Center how does it look summary tab IP address is right domain name is right host attached that's running on Izzy it's excited at lab to local doesn't say that Cox dotnet anymore so that worked out great I feel highly confident this infrastructure I built it's exactly how I wanted it to be running while I head out on a plane right very shortly finish packing finishing touches while the focus of this video is simplicity and I'm going to take a look at my quick checklist to see if I checked all the important things that I do very soon after setting up my lab so a few more minutes have gone by and remember I said I want to create a shortcut with Chrome and then I'll feel like I'm kind of done setting up the user interfaces the gooeys the the server and everything well I'm getting close to that point I think so let's do this if you log in without forward slash anything you get probably an error the server still coming up let's see something proceed there we go notice you don't have to remember what to type it prompts you you want to log in the VCR client yeah that's what I want okay so that's the URL that's going to become important we're going to test that we can do remote control of VMs we're going to make sure pop-ups are allowed in Chrome and then we're done with all that we're then going to pin and I screen icon right next to V is for your client we're going to have a vcr web client right next to it okay [Music] you may remember me mentioning too if we install LastPass plug-in we can i'm auto logging for that administrator views for local that annoys you typing that that can be automated and i already have an article about that it's time to test remote control now if you have existing VMS which i do be good time to fire one of those up or you can just use the vCenter one you already have there let's make this full screen now and it says launch remote console notice what happens pop-up locked so that's a problem allow pop-ups this is always allow from vCenter don't live to local so that sounds promising right now we hit this again and see what happens nothing vrm see it brings up this URL but you don't get anything happening why would that be well we need to download this thing download remote console and I get to login okay logged in and the download begins it's very small so we're done with that here's access control yes and we're now going to have a remote control window that opens the separate windows binary now if you have windows version of VMware Workstation or the Linux one I suppose vrm see that API that a tab you saw in the Chrome browser that would actually trigger your VMware Workstation opening if you had installed in my case I don't this is a vanilla pristine Windows 8 one you're seeing for the purposes of this lab setup okay it warns me it wants me to reboot kind of weird right but sure won't take very long I'll pause until that's done rebooting my windows a1 and the reboot is done let's fire up Chrome and see where we're at okay that's the URL we want okay so this time launch remote console should work better one more question remember this for all links to this type and it's going to launch an application VMware remote console and another one off question always trusts with a certificate and connect and there we go success to get your mouse set up hostage mode ctrl alt ok let's try that again close it clean it close the license warning and now when we click Launch remote console should pop right up and it did so success now it's time to pin it so we're comfortable that Chrome's configured properly ready to pick so we log out brings us right back to the vSphere login page here's the fun part click here click more tools create application shortcut and then just click great and look what just happened magically the URL bar went away doesn't look like a browser anymore just like I promised you alright let's close that maybe we put the rnc to the right so now we have vSphere client and vSphere web client how cool is that and I don't like clutter on my desk when I can't help it so I'll get rid of that so that's it that piece is all good to go let me convince you it works [Music] look at the properties of that thing you'll see it's just URL you can actually start it maximized every time if you prefer so it just fills the window by default so that's done it works it does remote control some of the first things you're going to do are create a new virtual machine in my case we could do that we've got existing virtual machines but if this is the first time you've ever created your own lab you're going to be pretty excited to do some stuff with it but again the other group of people that might be watching this are people who have done 5/5 before and you don't really have to rebuild from scratch I did not format anything other than my USB flash drive all my local data stores are still there let me show you what I mean go to the ESXi lab at local let's try that again managed storage here's all my SATA ports on my motherboard and here's the storage bunch of drives it's 250 gig in size and it shows flash drive okay now we head over here to the storage icon go to storage go to 256 gig SSD and go to manage you'll see it shows the VMFS filesystem on there it shows how much storage is available which space is available on there what device is backing it you get all kinds of good details that's the lcz vertex how about we just right click and say browse files notice what it did it jump to the MANET the storage managed files location that's all it did we've got this Windows 10 template register VM when you click on the vmx file and point to the ESXi host you want it on click finish great now we have a VM same goes for another datastore I've got some stuff on there register VM so my point here is maybe you rebuilt your data center maybe you didn't buy the one year long eval experience license if you run out of that 60 days you haven't lost much other than the hour or two to rebuild a lab right and actually I talked during a lot of this video you could do it pretty quickly but here's the point now we have a little library of virtual machines already but for more advanced users they're getting bored at this point I don't want to war people I want to now go on to the more fine-tuning chapters I'm going to do an auto log-in with LastPass and I'm going to see about the certificate warnings when you log into that look a little ugly with chrome so if you want to stick around for those little more advanced home lab spit-and-polish techniques great useful if you are already a LastPass user or even if you're not you could just make an account just for this one reason and that is auto log-in okay so it tells us a install LastPass and then here's how you configure it alright so I'm going to go ahead and install LastPass at this point all I need is the LastPass Chrome extension you [Music] okay chosen the tray it's ready so now basically after the reboot of the host is done a server and this comes up I can log back into the appliance I can be following along with this animated gif exactly to get this to work so I'm going to take a little break here okay resume the video because I'm ready to fire up Chrome by right-clicking bringing up a new Chrome window there we go pull that over to the left and let's go to the vSphere client login all right the looping video says save all data so I'm going to go ahead and start typing [Music] okay once it's all typed in following along on the right here and tools and save I'll enter data under Advanced Settings auto log-in save login all right the real test is for the second login did it really work right so let's let's see how that looks next log off or log out excuse me close that fire up a new copy of Chrome and when let me look it should just log in now as acknowledging the article on the right some circumstances still have to reach for the mouse and hit login it doesn't always seem to auto login in Chrome no typing needed right that's the point a home lab pretty convenient next article I love this article and I haven't actually tested this since when it first came out has been a while so let me try this it's Andres pete's telling us how to get rid of the certificate warnings sounds good and what's elegant about it is he handles all browsers doesn't matter so he does it on an OS level thing not just Firefox or Chrome so that to me is kind of the ultimate so how do I want to get this to work well I need to suck this file out of the vCenter appliance if I'm not a whiz at putty and SCP and moving files to and from windows frankly you're probably going to find it really easy to just download when SCP extremely handy to have but we don't need to install one SCP we can just do portable all right so there is a portable version and we can make it a little more permanent by putting something like a utility folder like I have all we need is that file and we can pin it to the taskbar and how I have a handy-dandy winscp are you telling you that's not a good idea it warns you okay we double click and now we wait for it to connect say yes to that question say never show this banner again and little issue there okay that's better so when SCP isness is downloaded we made a shortcut to the exe it's not installed there's nothing to uninstall it's just an exe hanging on the hard drive and for a good year now it's been very slow when you first login with timeouts but eventually it will connect I figured out why that is and I don't really use the tool that much but so once we have winscp going we'll be able to grab the certificate file that andreas is article talks about and we'll be able to do it with drag-and-drop mouse keys but be very careful editing or well if you don't know what you're doing at all and Linux could be a little dangerous that is taking very long to connect any air or showing nope of course it's the other andreas Pete's article this one remember the shell is not enabled by default so then tells us so we don't have to type shell every time we're going to put it in let me remind you what I'm talking about ok that session is gone if we fire a putty and we go to V Center you get to type that every time well here's a way we don't have to ok and then as article goes on to say handy if you want to use one SCP so let's go back to SFTP and the advanced settings of the connection enter that as the FTP server save it and test it we're in nice Thank You andreas awesome articles next go up to the root and let's navigate our way to the other article which tells us here it is for V Center appliance the file is right there so bar Lib VMware MCA root dot certificate do we want to put it in documents so I suppose so now we drag and drop from right to left cut the file finally along I'm going out of here close it and he tells us what to do right click and install ok so I'm going to go to documents right click install certificate select local machine say yes for user access control import was successful so now we fire up a extra copy of Chrome we go here it worked it didn't pop up saying this is a non authentic site in fact I didn't even have to hit enter for the login it's just completely automated the login alright so I was wrong and that you still have certificate warnings but you don't have the nasty thing you have to click on in Chrome close all browser sessions so here we go we're going to try my vSphere web client and see how smoothly it launches okay it launches maximized and types everything in for me didn't actually automatically hit enter for me okay now particularly go around no nasty chrome bypassed and valid certificate messages so I would say that was pretty slick completely successful I met all the objectives and had some fun in got windows configured exactly the way I like is the first time actually from beginning to end I've done this whole process and I did a many rehearsals different showstopper problems feels good to have finally have it done hey it's now two weeks later after recording the three hours of raw video that I just sifted through this weekend I spent hours editing this video and I took it so seriously actually shipped a 2560 by 1440 monitor to hear my atone so I could get this done because I am so stoked about sending this video out to the world and the reasons are it's just the tip of the iceberg as far as projects for instance if you just got through this video well here you'll see I have a bunch of VMs some old some new I still have another dozen VMs that are out there I just haven't reacted to inventory but basically I'm already having fun right you've got Windows 10 one zero zero seven four I was able to effectively use that right from here on my hotel room and test things out like the new browser what's another extremely useful thing that's happened well enabling HCI and real tech a very common for your drives to disappear when you get to ESXi 6 out or even 5 5 for that matter and it's pretty easy to reinstall those drivers so I'm going to have a video covering that how about automatically shutting down your data center gracefully so we have the super guide about UPS's and if you scroll the article that you would want would be if you're running a virtualization lab that you just set up how to shut it all down gracefully so if you get one of these batteries you're going to have pretty easy time of setting up a USB connection to a VM that's left running it's called an appliance the CyberPower appliance and you know it automatically just gracefully shuts down all my VMs and then ESXi I host just like it did dutifully for me while I was two thousand miles away and the thunderstorm hit my home here's V men point back up I've got machines backing up over a machi VPN that's running in this tunnel does tunnel that's left running and they're going to a file share but I leave running I also have a Windows Server 2012 r2 essentials that can do backups as well which I've covered from time to time on my site and another project you might consider in the future would be something like Open VPN that allows me to securely use the cable modem in my home with a wired connection going with something called vtd or pass through right to a VM called Open VPN server that's a Linux clients which was actually fairly straightforward to configure for VPN while I'm on the road with my mobile or laptop devices so again at just a vast array of projects finally because a lot of folks use ad blockers these days if you try to support a site like this well you've got the buttons right there and you at the end of the video like use some suggestions like a tip jar here's another one this article about Amazon affiliate link you can actually just click on Amazon before you buy here hopefully you found this video helpful and hopefully you liked the idea of me continue to make free content like this which is challenging and time-consuming I quite enjoy the lab time I can't say I enjoy the work of editing the video something as long as that's an ambitious is this so please do leave your comments open honest I really appreciate them I appreciate them so much that they're right here on the front of my website and they tend to be really helpful to me to know what people are thinking as the reading my articles and where I could do better so thank you I hope you're excited about creating your home lab

Channel: Paul Braren

Views: 1,134,303

Keywords: vSphere, vsphere 6.0, Datacenter, Home Lab, Whitebox, ESXi 6.0, vCSA, VMware

Id: Hm7kQHI4YnM

Length: 78min 59sec (4739 seconds)

Published: Fri May 08 2015