How to Install VMware vSphere Hypervisor 7.0 - Start to finish ESXi 7

it's no secret that we think esxi is the best hypervisor out there feel free to tell us how you disagree with that in the comments below but in both homeland server builds we've done we've skipped over the installation of esxi in the setup we've received numerous comments asking us to go through an esxi install and setup so in this video we're going to make good on that we'll be walking you through the entire process from installing esxi hypervisor to creating your first virtual machine one word of warning this video is long so use those timestamps to navigate around as needed before we get started though let's get some assumptions out of the way first you've got your system set up with at least one network interface and two hard drives or storage targets for data store and esxi install second you have the knowledge on how to burn an iso to a cd or build a usb stick based off of an iso downloading esxi for free starts off with going to vmware.com and heading to the download section at the top of the screen next navigate over to free product downloads on the left and then to vsphere hypervisor to obtain a free copy of esxi and a free basic perpetual license you'll need to have a vmware account if you have one you can immediately download esxi if you don't you gotta jump to the hoops to create an account but i promise it's not painful go do it now after your account is created you'll be able to download esxi and you'll see your free license key save this key you'll need to add it to your hypervisor later boot off your usb install stick or burn cd of the esxi iso you downloaded from vmware the first thing you're going to see is the initial loading and decompressing of the files that are part of the installer this process can be quick or slow depending on what your installation media is ah your first taste of the signature gray and yellow esxi console window bask in its two-toned glory at this moment the esxi installer is loading all its modules and drivers into memory before we start the actual installation process welcome to the vmware esxi 701 installation vmware would really like you to know what the vmware compatibility guide is and where to see it and it's actually a useful thing to check if you're concerned about whether your hardware is supported by vmware we'll hit ok to continue on now on to the eula which we've totally read and memorized by heart we'll press f11 to move on to the next step next stop is the installer scanning the hardware of your system to find available storage devices you can target to install esxi okay so our installer found two disks in our machine notice that my disks are vmware virtual disks that's because i'm installing esxi inside a virtual machine that's running on esxi it's pretty cool that we have an inception like that i know leonardo dicaprio would be super proud but in all seriousness keep in mind that if you want to experiment in your home lab with building different environments it's a neat way to create an entire miniature virtual home lab world and as a side note this is how vmware does its training for students anyway you might have a lot of storage devices in your system and you might be confused about which one is which we have two here one four gig that will be our installation location for esxi and one 100 gigabyte disk that will later turn into our data store to hold our virtual machines if at any time you're confused about what is what you can press f1 and get additional details about the storage device here's the disk details it tells me the model and vendor of the storage device the unique name the installer has named the disk the type of bus interface it uses if it already has an installation of esxi on it if it's an ssd and if there are data stores on the disk already we'll hit enter and go back to the list of storage devices really quick you can target any number of devices to be your esxi installation location in all of our virtual hosts here in the studio we use internal usb sticks as our installation target and that's a completely reliable and supported way to install esxi if you have a host with an internal usb port you can also use a single disk a mirror of disk if you're concerned about redundancy and so on again for our purposes here we'll select our four gigabyte installation disk that will be our pretend internal usb stick press enter to select the disk now we gotta choose our default language for the hypervisor we're in the united states and we're using a default query keyboard so we'll leave its default and hit enter okay it's time to give the root user its password in esxi root is the highest level privileged user if you're familiar with linux you're familiar with what the root user is if you're a windows user right is the equivalent of the local pc administrator enter your password of choice twice and hit enter to continue next stop is just a confirmation that we're about to install esxi on our chosen storage device and if there's any data on the disk it's going to go bye-bye let's hit f11 to kick this thing off installation can be quick or it can take a while it all depends on what you're installing esxi on if it's a usb stick internally it will take a bit as it writes to the stick so sit back and enjoy boom esxi is installed let's hit enter and reboot this host okay esxi is loading notice at the top where it says loading vmware esxi and not loading vmware esxi installer that's a quick and easy way to tell you're now booting off of your freshly installed hypervisor and not the installation media once we're fully booted we'll be greeted by the esxi console ah yes more of that truly stunning gray and yellow ascii work of art i'm kidding obviously but it is the standard esxi console the thing you'll see every time you plug your monitor into the host this display shows us the version of esxi the cpus that are installed and the clock speed of those cpus and the amount of memory on the host down below we see the two manages host go to text but before we jump over to the web interface of the hypervisor we're going to change our ip address from dhcp to a static address let's talk about why first with all infrastructure systems like this it's always best practice to use a static ip address and never use dhcp as a means of addressing for critical systems relying on dhcp is a risk especially if your dhcp server goes offline and your lease to your host expires without an ip address you won't be able to manage the host and also dhcp addresses can change over time leaving you searching for the current address of your host not a good thing so we'll press f2 to make some changes enter in your freshly set root password and hit enter this is the system customization screen where we can make basic configuration changes to our hypervisor this is also where you can reset your configs if all is broken and you just need to do over we're going to focus on just configuring the management interface of this host navigate down to configure management host interface and hit enter here's where we'll switch from dhcp to static and set our static address i'm going to give this host an address on my network i know is not going to cause a conflict and leave everything else the same same subnet and default gateway and press enter you can also change your dns configuration of the host while you're here set a host name add multiple dns suffixes if you have them on your internal network but we're just going to go ahead and hit escape to log out and say yes to our changes and we're back to the main console where we can see the new static address has been set okay we are done with the initial setup next step is to open up a web browser and log into the web interface to set up our data stores virtual networks and so on let's get to it pop open your modern browser of choice i'm using chrome and in the address bar at the top enter the static ip address you configured on the esxi console depending on your browser you'll likely be greeted by your connection is not private message because your new esxi host has a self-signed ssl certificate that your browser doesn't trust it's okay we'll get through this just click advanced and proceed on to the site thanks google ooh pretty blue this is the login page of esxi you remember that root user and password we set that's the credits you used to log in here let's do it now and click log in vmware would love to have you sign up for their customer experience improvement program it's not mandatory and it's completely up to you whether you'd like to participate or not click ok and make that nagging window go away welcome to the vmware esxi hypervisor ui let's take a moment and go over it so you can get familiar in the center middle of the screen is an overview of your virtual host its hardware its configuration and its system information below that is the recent tasks pane where recent tasks and operations will appear you'll see entries there when something happens on the host like starting or stopping vms making configuration changes and so on it's an at a glance list and things fall off it rather quickly so just because you don't see it listed there doesn't mean it didn't happen now on the left side of the screen is where we find the navigation pane here's where we'll switch between the different areas of the ui we're already on the host tab so let's click on the manage tab inside this screen we have the system tab which has sub options for advanced settings auto start for configuring which vms you want to start up automatically when the host starts and in what order swap which allows you to set your host swap file settings and the time and date settings for the host next tab over is the hardware tab inside here we'll see all of the detected hardware of your physical host running esxi in most cases these items will be grayed out for you because you can't modify any configurations for them but you can click on them to get further details if you're planning on passing through any physical hardware installed on this host this is where you configure it also we have a power management tab that allows you to configure your power management policies for the host if that's your thing for a basic configuration though this isn't necessary next up is the licensing tab where you can you guessed it add your license key that you got when you signed up and downloaded esxi you have a 60-day evaluation of esxi starting day one of your fresh install to play with all of the features if you'd like for basic vms your free license will work just fine but you don't need to be in a rush to add your license until you get close to your license expiration packages are next essentially this is a full list of all the modules and driver packages that were installed when you installed esxi you can also install more packages via the install update button but that's outside of our wheelhouse for this video so let's stay in our lane services is up next here you can see all the services and demons that are running on the hypervisor you can start stop and restart them as needed but beware doing so might affect your host buried below here would be the ssh server service that you can start if you wish to log into the command line interface of your esxi host last is security and users within here you can set your system's acceptance level which is more of an advanced configuration setting for package security set up active directory authentication under the authentication tab change certificates if you're too good for a self-signed insert add users roles and configure lockdown mode back over to the navigation pane let's choose monitor the first tab is the performance tab which gives you a bird's eye view of your system's performance you can select different performance graphs like cpu memory network and disk performance next tab over is the hardware tab if your hardware has ipmi enabled sensors you'll find details about them here people who are running esxi on desktop hardware will likely not see anything listed here while people running on server gear will see details from any ipmi hardware sensors on their system same thing goes for the storage tab you'll find details about the health of your storage system assuming your storage supports it events tab is pretty self-explanatory here's where you can dig through previous events that have occurred on your host tasks give you a view of the tasks that have run on the host and whether they executed successfully or not the logs tab is the home of the logs of your esxi host if you're interested in the gory details of what's happening in your host dig through these logs to satisfy that need also when things go sideways this is the place to start digging lastly the notifications tab if any notifications pop up on the ui they'll be collected here so if you happen to dismiss something you didn't intend to check here next up virtual machines and as you might have guessed here's where you create start stop and generally manipulate vms running on the host now on to storage here's where you'll manage any data stores you have on your system a data store is vmware's term for a pool of storage that will contain your vms at first we don't have any data stores defined we'll take care of that in a moment lastly this is the networking tab here's where we define and create virtual switches manage physical necks vm kernel nics and more things can get complex here but thankfully right out of the box your new host has a default virtual switch also known as a v-switch ready to go and connected to the same nic you defined as part of your management network setup during the initial install one more cool quick thing to show you here is the visualization of the v-switch if you select the virtual switches tab under networking and then select the default vswitch zero switch you'll see under the vswitch topology a visual representation of this virtual switch on the left you'll see the vm network portion of the virtual switch here where vms that you assign to the vm network will virtually connect from below you see the management network and the interface for the host we assigned earlier and on the right you see the physical network interface of the host itself that connects to your home network this tab also gives you details about mtu size the quantity of the available virtual ports attached vms and more there are very few things we need to configure right out of the box to get started building vms first thing is getting the date and time set on the host let's swing over to the manage tab and the system tab within and click on time and date click edit ntp settings choose use network time protocol enable ntp client radio button change the ntp server startup policy to start and stop with host and enter your favorite upstream ntb provider we'll throw in google's ntp host and click save okay it's time to set up our first data store navigate back to storage on the left once there click the new data store button at the top now we're greeted with the new data store wizard we'll be creating a new vmfs datastore so let's click that and click next now we need to give our new data to our name what you choose to name it is completely up to you and you can always change the name in the future if you want to we're going to be super technical here in neymar's store one because we're original like that click next here's where you can decide how you want to break up the disk for the simplest configs we're going to just consume the entire disk if you need to break up a disk into multiple partitions go for it but keep in mind doing so won't give you better performance click next okay it's time to review our impending changes to disk all looks good so let's click finish say yes to the nagging warning about impending formatting and ratio of the target disk and boom we have our first data store outstanding work i think it's time for us to build a quick virtual machine as an example here but before we do that we need to get an iso to build the vm into our data store so we can mount it to the vm when we start it up this is a good time for you to download a copy of ubuntu linux and save that iso somewhere easy to get from your pc i'll wait but not too long get on it ok great now click on your new data store at the top and click on datastore browser this page will allow you to navigate the datastore's file system by default it's pretty empty in here so let's create a folder to hold our downloaded iso click create directory we'll call ours isos because that's what we're going to put in there now click create directory we can now see our isos directory and it's empty let's upload the iso that we downloaded select the isos directory and click upload at the top select your iso and click open to start the upload once the upload is complete you'll see the iso listed in the directory click close now let's head over to our virtual machines tab and make our first vm up at the top click create slash register vm okay here's the vm creation wizard we're going to make a new vm so let's select create a new virtual machine and then we'll click next we'll need to give it a name we'll call ours linux vm because we're original like that and then we'll select the guest os family the term guest is another word for a virtual machine and in this case it's going to be linux so we'll choose linux next we'll tell esxi which version of linux our guest vm will be running so we'll navigate to ubuntu 64-bit and now we'll hit next okay remember that data store we just built a bit ago yeah that one that's the one that we'll be selecting to hold our vm's files since we only have one in the system anyway we'll just hit next now we get to determine the hardware of our new vm the defaults here are the ones that vmware provides based on the os family inversion you chose previously of course you know better about what your vm is going to need than the defaults do so take a moment and decide how much cpu memory and storage you wish to assign to your vm you'll also notice that your default vm is assigned to the default vm network via its virtual nic and so once it's up and running you'll have network access before we continue on we need to assign that iso we uploaded to our data store so that our virtual machine can boot off that image so click the box that says host device under cd slash dvd drive 1 and select data store iso file now you're greeted with the familiar file explorer of your data store navigate to the location of the iso we uploaded select it and click select okay let's light this candle click next to continue on final page is just the details of what's about to be committed to disk have a look and click finish that sweet new vm you just created is ready to be started let's click on its title to have a look at it first now let's click on the play button in the middle of the darken screen there to start our vm here we go your first vm is running on your freshly installed esxi host you rock what you do from this point on with your hardware and vms is totally up to you tell us what you think of this video we'd love to hear from you would you like to see more how to's let us know in those comments if this is the first time you've seen us consider subscribing like do it right now we're on twitter and instagram so go follow us and be all social and finally we have a discord we'd love to have you join it talk about videos we make home lab and more it's a great community and we love to have you thank you for watching and we will see you again soon [Music] you

Channel: 2GuysTek

Views: 28,123

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Id: YhXsX4kJS3M

Length: 17min 18sec (1038 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 26 2021