How to Install VMware vSphere Hypervisor 8.0 - Start to finish ESXi 8

well it's about time you know it's been almost two full years since we released our how to install esxi 7 video now the VMware has officially released esxi8 it's time we release our updated video as well so if you're looking to get started with ESX I8 stick around this video will be a step-by-step tutorial starting with downloading and installing esxi8 then configuration and walk through a vsxi via the management web UI and then finally building your first VM on your new host if you're looking for something specific check the chapters below to jump to the part you need if this is your first time working with esxi I highly recommend you run through this video from beginning to end sound good let's get to it to run esxi on a host you need to meet the following minimum requirements officially speaking for Intel anything sixth generation and above is supported and for AMD Zen 2 and above is also supported I say officially supported because you can force esxi8 to install and function on unsupported CPUs which is totally fine for a home lab or test environment if you don't have more Modern Hardware lying around esxi8 needs a minimum of 8 gigabytes of RAM but you need more like 12 to really effectively run any VMS on it you'll need at least one compatible one gig network interface for your install disk you'll need at least a 32 gigabyte disk for the esxi hypervisor to live on and like older versions of vs6i it cannot be a USB stick and of course you'll need at least one disk for storing your virtual machines on this can be an nvme SSD or even a mechanical SATA disk alright assuming you've got the necessary Hardware let's go get ourselves a copy of vsxi8 open up your browser of choice and head over to vmware.com go slash get Dash free Dash esxi you're going to need an account with VMware to download esxi8 and get your Forever key if you don't have an account creating one is easy and free and they don't continually spam you click the create account link and run through that process we'll wait foreign [Music] for those of you who already have an account click the I have an account link and log in since we already have an account that's what we'll do once logged in we'll need to register to get our copy of esxi8 so we'll swing down and click register below and yes we'll have to fill out yet another form and scroll to the bottom and click Start free trial don't worry you're not getting a trial copy of esxi8 here trust me back on the eval page you now see your Forever key for esxi as well as a link to download the esxi hypervisor install ISO first things first copy your key and save it we'll need it after we get esxi installed now we'll click the manually download button and get our copy of the esxi installation ISO save that too we'll need it here in a second all right now we need to create our bootable USB stick to install esxi on our host to do this we'll be using our tried and true favorite ISO to USB software called Rufus to create the boot stick you can download Rufus free of charge from rufus.ie it's an indispensable tool so keep it around in your it bag of tools anyway this is Rufus we'll be using an 8 gig USB stick which we've already inserted in C listed at the top all we need to do is Click select to select our downloaded ISO image navigate to our freshly downloaded VMware esxi ISO file select it and click open now we click start at the bottom and click ok to the warning about the destroying of the contents of the USB stick and wait for the process to complete depending on the USB stick you chose and the write speed of that stick this can take a bit so let it finish and done okay pull that stick it's time to install esxi on your new host you can install e6i I'm practically supported Hardware you like your home lab doesn't have to be running on server iron like we do here at the channel this little Lenovo think Center here is a perfect option with this 8th gen Intel i7 CPU a 500 gig nvme for boot and a one terabyte mechanical disc for additional storage whatever you choose I recommend that you try to have at least an SSD in the system for VM storage for the best performance for your VMS on our little host here we'll be using the nvme for VM storage as well as the install Target for the hypervisor which is a completely supported method of running esxi the mechanical disk will be used for storing files like isos and other data we'll use for the VMS anyway let's get this install started alright I'm going to assume you've inserted the bootable USB stick we made just a bit ago and that you know how to configure your host to boot off that stick I'd love to tell you how to do that but different Hardware takes different steps so refer to your motherboard manual or Google searches to figure out how if you don't already know when you successfully boot off the USB stick you should see the esxi installer loading screen startup and begin booting the boot process can take a bit depending on your USB stick's read speed your host and the interface you're using give it a bit and let it start up welcome to the VMware esxi 8.0.0 installation VMware would really like you to know that they only support running esxi on supported hardware and would love for you to go check out their compatibility guide it is generally useful to check it out when you're planning to add new hardware to your host but for right now we'll just hit enter to continue ah yes what installation wouldn't be complete without a mile long unit to agree to thankfully you don't have to scroll to the bottom to accept this so let's just do what everyone else does and pretend we read it let's hit f11 to get to the next screen the esxi installer will now scan your hardware for installation targets for the OS and present them for you to choose from like I mentioned earlier I have two discs in this host one 500 gigabit nvme which will run dual Duty as my esxi install Target and my datastore for VMS and an additional one terabyte mechanical satidisc for additional storage you might have a ton of disks in your host and it can be hard to know which one is which so you can always select a disk and press F1 to get detailed information on the selected disk anyway we're going to Target the nvme disc as the the new home for our esxi8 install so we'll hit enter to continue of course the installer wants you to be aware that this action will wipe out any existing data on your install Target just in case you didn't know that would happen so let's hit enter again to continue now we need to choose our keyboard layout I'm in the US so obviously I'm going to choose the US default but if you're in another part of the world use the arrow keys to scroll to find the layout that best fits you let's hit enter to continue alright it is password time for those of you new to esxi or Linux Unix os's in general root is the administrator user the user has all the rights and privileges and in the case of VMware esxi is the only user on the host out of the box and because this account has the highest level privileges you should choose a password that's secure go ahead and enter that password now and then again to confirm if you see a message that says passwords match then we're in business let's hit enter to continue and just when you think you've confirmed enough you get one last chance to back out not us we are ready to do this hit f11 and let's get this party started installation can take a bit so let it do its thing feel free to grab a cup of coffee and wait [Music] let's get going shall we congratulations you've just installed esxi8 now let's reboot this host and do some basic but very necessary configurations before we hit the web interface alright here we go booting our fresh install of esxi8 yes it does look very similar to the initial part of the install process thanks for noticing let me be the first to say welcome to the console of esxi8 if you are not a fan of gray and yellow you will be by the end of this you will be you will anyway this is all you'll ever see on the video output from your host from now on and you'll rarely ever need to visit here we do however need to make a few quick changes to the management interface of our host by default our host grabbed a DHCP address and while that's cool and all it's not the right way to do this we need to give our host a static address because that's best practice we'll hit F2 and then we'll enter in the super secret root password we set during the installation after you've entered in the password hit enter okay we're going to make a few quick changes to our hosts management Network so arrow down to configure management Network and hit enter there's a lot you can do in this configuration menu you can add change or remove network adapters from your management interface of your host set a VLAN ID for your management network if you're running a managed VLAN and of course make changes to your IP addresses and DNS configurations which we'll be doing right now arrow down to ipv4 configuration and hit enter as I said by default the host uses DHCP which is fine but I highly recommend you set a static IP address for your virtual host DHCP is for clients not servers so don't be lazy let's arrow down to set static IP address and network configuration and press the spacebar to select it then arrow down and set your IP address for your host we'll use 192.168.021 but your network will likely be different once set hit enter to continue alright we need to set up DNS for your host so let's arrow down to DNS configuration and hit enter once again we'll use the arrow keys to select use the following DNS server addresses and hostname and press spacebar to select it and then at a minimum set a hostname for your host your DNS servers will likely be correct because they were obtained via DHCP we're going to name our box esxi8 because we're original like that you can name yours anything you want once you've chosen a hostname for your host hit enter if you have more than one DNS suffix on your network you can add the additional suffixes using the custom DNS suffixes config we don't so we'll move on all done here so we'll hit Escape now we're asked if we want to apply the changes that we've made to our management Network we'll hit Y and those changes become a reality back to the systems configuration screen we're basically done here I will however show you one useful thing that you can use to verify your network changes were correct arrow down to test management Network and hit enter alright here you can run a quick ping connectivity test to make sure your host management network is configured correctly and ready to rock by default the addresses that were automatically added here are your DNS servers Network Gateway and the host's new host name those are all great targets by default however you need to have created a dnsa record for the new hostname for it to properly resolve we're going to throw some different addresses in here to test if our host can get out to the internet and resolve host names we'll leave the first two addresses as is because they are our internal DNS servers We'll add 8.8.8.8 to address number two which is Google's public DNS server on the internet and change the hostname to google.com to verify that we can resolve host names properly with DNS you can use any addresses you'd like all that matters here is that when you hit enter you get back oks for each if you don't check your network configuration before continuing we'll hit enter to continue and Escape back to the esxi console screen all done here friends let's pop a browser from our desktop and continue our setup of vsxi shall we okay back to our browser of choice head up to your address bar and enter in the IP address of your host and hidden enter you're going to be greeted with a your connection is not private message because your esxi host is currently using a self-signed SSL certificate rest assured your connection is in fact private so click Advanced and then click the proceed link below thanks Google assuming all is well you should be greeted by the esxi host client login web interface for those of you coming from esxi 7 you'll notice that VMware has spruced up the place a bit once again we'll enter root as the username and then your super secret password that you're getting so good at entering once you've done that click login welcome friends to the esxi host client web UI pretty cool huh let's take a tour and get familiar with the UI on initial login we land at the host summary page on the left hand side of the screen is the navigation menu that we'll go through here in a bit in the main window we see summary details of our virtual host including a hardware summary configuration information system information and a performance graph summary from the last hour up at the top right of the main window we have a capacity overview of the host including how much CPU RAM and storage are being currently utilized and down at the bottom of the screen we have a recent tasks pane that gives you a live list of currently running and completed tasks on your host let's pop over to management in the Navigator pane under the system tab our first stop is on advanced settings here you can make changes to a variety of different advanced settings on your esxi host I'm going to be honest with you here unless you're trying to solve a problem or experimenting for fun it's very unlikely that you'll be making changes here next up is the auto start tab AutoStart is where you'd configure VMS to start up with the host by default when you create VMS those VMS will not start when you you power up the host for VMS you want to power up when the host Powers up you'd come here and select the VMS you want to auto start set their priority and so on useful stuff now onto the swap tab this allows you to Define where the swap file for your VMS will Exist by default you don't need to make any changes here but if you want to keep your VM swap file within the VMS data store you could make that config change here time and date is critical for your host and our first stop to make a configuration change accurate date and time is necessary for a healthy host valid timestamps are crucial for troubleshooting logs and the correct time is necessary for all varieties of authentication and authorization we'll be configuring ntp on our new host so let's head up to edit ntp settings alright let's set our host to use NTB by clicking the radio button next to use Network time protocol and then we'll change the ntp service startup policy from start and stop manually to start and stop with host if you miss changing the setting your host will not synchronize time lastly we'll need to provide a few public ntp servers for our host to synchronize with the three IP addresses we'll be entering here are nist ntp servers in the United States you can use the same ntp servers we're using here or any ntp service you'd like just separate the IP addresses with a comma once you've entered in your preferred ntp server addresses click save you'll notice that the ntp service is not started yet don't worry we'll get there shortly moving on let's click hardware at the top our first stop is the PCI devices tab here you see all of the hard Hardware that esxi has detected within your host if you want to pass through Hardware to a VM this is the location where you'd go to do it next tab is the power management tab this tab is where you can make changes to the power management policies of your virtual host once again it's very unlikely you'd be making any changes here next up is licensing out of the box fresh installs of esxi operate on a 60-day evaluation license this evaluation license has every licensable feature enabled if you want to play with esxi and vcenter with all the bells and whistles enabled you can do that for 60 days we're going to go ahead and apply the lessons key we receive from VMware when we registered our copy on the website that license is very basic but is perpetual and there are no limits to the amount of VMS you can run on your host we'll click assign license at the top paste in the license key we copied from the VMware website click check license and then assign license just that simple moving on next tab is the packages tab this section provides you a list of all the installed drivers and packages that are installed as part of the default installation of vsxi alright on to the services tab these services or demons serve various functions for the es6i host and for the most part you won't need to make changes here we will however be starting the ntp client service to get our host synchronizing time from the ntp service we just set up under date and time we'll locate the ntp Daemon highlight it and click the start button on the top to get the service started it'll take a moment to start up and synchronize time you won't need to do this again if you remember from earlier we set the ntp service to start with the host so on the next reboot the host will automatically start the ntp demon all good moving on the last tab under manage is Security in users our first stop is acceptance level VMware Prides itself on building a stable and robust hypervisor as a way to protect a host from untrusted or unsafe packages and drivers from being installed VMware defines different trust Levels by default the host is set to allow installations of trusted packages and drivers from trusted Partners these are signed packages from trusted Partners VMware has vetted to ensure stability for your hypervisor there are three other levels VMware certified which are packages certified by VMware VMware accepted which are packages that are not certified but receive blessing and oversight from VMware and lastly the community level which is the wild west of unsigned and untrusted packages authentication is next if you have a Microsoft active directory server functioning and you want to join your esxi to ads for authentication here's where you do it joining your domain is relatively easy to do assuming you have the rights in ads to do so moving on next stop is certificates when we installed the s6i one of the functions it performed as part of the installation was to generate a self-signed certificate for use on the host that's the certificate details we see shown here if you want to install a new certificate on your esxi host and make the Google Chrome Gods happy here's where you would do it this is assuming you have a pki or public key infrastructure setup somewhere to generate your trusted certificates under users we find our one and only user listed this is pretty self-explanatory but for simplicity's sake if you want a great users that had specific roles for managing say VMS or data stores here's where you'd create them now on to roles esxi uses rbac or a role-based Access Control concept where users are added to groups or roles that Grant the rights and privileges you'd want them to have to do certain tasks lastly but not least is lockdown mode put simply lockdown mode essentially allows you to lock down your host so that no changes can be made to its configuration this is a standard means of hardening the host to protect it from accidental or malicious changes as well lockdown mode can have user exceptions as well which are useful if you want to deploy your host in a lockdown mode but want a break glass admin account to use in case something needs changing or something goes wrong that's it for the for the web UI vsxi let's take a look at monitoring back to the navigation pane let's head over to monitoring on the left monitoring your host is obviously a very important part of managing your host on the first tab performance we can graph out the utilization of different Hardware aspects of our virtual Host this includes CPU utilization memory utilization Network bandwidth usage and of course disk throughput as well if you're having performance issues with your virtual machines these graphs can give you a great 10 000 foot view of what's going on with your box next tab is hardware and system sensors depending on the hardware you installed esxi on you may have a lot of information here or like me none at all server Hardware usually has dedicated baseboard management controllers and ipmi capabilities that monitor all aspects of the system my little Lenovo thinkcenter doesn't have any of those capabilities so there's nothing here below system sensors is storage monitoring again you may see information here and you may not depending on the hardware you've installed in your host and whether your system is server class or just a desktop moving on next tab is the events tab where you'll find events that have occurred on your host it's important to note that an event can be anything from a user logging in to a service starting to a system issue anything can be an event so it's a great place to check for troubleshooting as well now on to tasks tasks are actions that were executed on behalf of a user on your host when you create a VM or start and stop one those actions are tasks that are executed against the virtual host tasks are also where you'd see the success or failure of configuration changes you've made this is also a great place to check if you're looking to remember if or when you shut down reboot it or otherwise changed a VM as a Time stamped entry will be listed here and as you can imagine it's where the recent tasks that were listed below can be found after they've fallen off the list the log tab allows you to view different logs on the host directly from the web UI back in my day we had to use SSH to log into the host to view the logs and now they're right here with a handy dandy search to boot right on and lastly the notification tab notifications are messages that you received when you logged into the host those messages can be dismissed or ignored from view on the host summary page and then will end up here as you can see I have some notifications that I've ignored and they'll be here for me to deal with at a later date alright let's dig into virtual machines storage virtual networks and finally build our first VM on our new host in the Navigator the virtual machine section is where you can create delete and interact with all VMS that are on the virtual host obviously we don't have any VMS on the host since it's brand new so we'll come back to this section in a bit moving on to Storage storage is where you'll find all the provision storage on your virtual host when we built this host installed esxi8 on the 500 gig ndme the install partitioned a section of the hard disk for the hypervisor install and made the rest of the space available for virtual machine storage as a data short name datastore one for reference VMware uses the term datastore to describe a storage device that is used for storing virtual machine files and other data if you remember I also have a one terabyte hard disk in this host that doesn't appear here in the list because it hasn't been provisioned yet let's walk through how to provision storage on your esxi host first things first let's click the new datastore button on top to start the wizard our options here are to either create a new vmfs datastore vmfs by the way is the file system used by esxi for storing data add an extent to an existing vmfs datastore expand an existing vmfs data store extent or mount an NFS share we're going to create a new data store so we'll stick with the first option but just as a side note if you have a Nas that can serve up NFS you can use that NFS share as the data store for VMS as well anyway let's head down and click next Next Step we'll need to choose the physical disk which is the target for our data store you can see in the list below my one terabyte disk is listed before we can continue we obviously need to give our new data store a name you can always rename a disk later without breaking anything so don't feel like you have to make the best choice right now anything descriptive about the disk its performance or its type will do we'll name this disk SATA HDD because well that's what it is and click next here you can decide how you want to partition out your disk we want to use the full disk for VM storage so we'll leave it on use full disk but if you had a need to break up the disc differently you could Vim fs6 is the most recent iteration of the vmfs file system and that's what we'll leave it set to Let's Move On by clicking next last stop is just a simple summary of the changes we're about to make to the disc including the name the target device the partitioning scheme and the version of vmfs will be formatting in all good let's click finish to complete the provisioning of course we're going to be asked one more time if we're absolutely sure if we want to format and provision this disk so let's click yes and now we see the new data store named SATA HDD listed below the name of the new data store clashes with the default datastore name provisioned when we installed so let's rename that while we're here to match it's super easy we'll just select the data store head up to actions at the top and select rename to keep in line with our previous naming convention we'll name this one nvme SSD and click save now they match how nice networking is our last stop in the Navigator by default we land on the port group tab Port groups are a way to configure in network settings that are then assigned to a virtual machine let's say your network has multiple vlans configured and you need those vlans to be accessible to certain VMS you would create a specific Port group that sets a specific VLAN for any machines assigned to it and then any VM added to that Port group would have their Network traffic tagged for a specific VLAN the concept might feel complicated now but you'll get the hang of it I promise the good news is you have a default Port group called VM Network that you can use right now to get your VMS out on your network the next tab is the virtual switch tab a v-switch or virtual switch is simply a virtual representation of a physical network switch but exists virtually as software on your host AV switch has physical uplinks that connect to the rest of your network just like a physical switch has uplinks to other network gear on your physical Network you can assign Port groups to v-switches and then use those uplinks to get out to your network there are other types of virtual switches like DV switches or distributed virtual switches but they require vcentered to Leverage physical necks are just what it says these are the physical network interfaces within your esxi host in the list we get an at a glance view of the V nickname the driver being used to control the device its Mac address its Auto negotiation configuration and its current link speed if connected we have just one here built into our host but you can easily imagine a virtual host in a data center with multiple high-speed network interfaces connecting out to all manners of physical networks next tab is the VM kernel next tab VM curl Knicks are virtual network interfaces that serve different purposes in esxi for example a VM kernelink is a virtual interface that can be used for management of the host can be provisioned for iSCSI attached storage vmotion and more on a build like ours we're only going to have one VM kernel Nick and it'll be assigned to the management Network for host management duties next stop is the TCP Stacks tab these are different TCP Stacks that are built for special purposes like emotion provisioning and so on you're not going to be utilizing this section much at all in a single host environment so we'll move on last stop is the firewall rules tab your a6i host has a built-in firewall that has rules configured by default to keep your host safe and only allow certain traffic in and out of the management interface keep in mind the firewall in esxi is not a firewall that protects or filters your virtual machine's Network traffic only the virtual host's management interface you still need to have firewalls on your VMS to protect them okay if you've stuck around all the way to this part of the video it's time to build your first VM let's get rolling we're going to build an Ubuntu 2204 desktop VM so naturally we need to have a copy of the Ubuntu 2204 desktop ISO to build it I've already downloaded a copy but before I can use that ISO to build my Linux VM I need to upload that ISO to my host so I can mount it to my VM as a CD so let's jump over to storage in the navigator on the left I have two data stores one being the ultra fast nvme with a smaller amount of storage and the other one being the one terabyte mechanical hard disk I'm going to place the install ISO on the Saturday store because it's slower has more space it will be a great storage place for isos so I'll select the SATA HDD data store on the right and then click the datastore browser button on the top the datastore browser is exactly what you think it is a simple file manager to browse the files and folders on a particular data store right now there's nothing on the SATA HDD except for a hidden folder used by esxi we're going to create a folder to hold our isos for easy management so we'll click the create directory button above give it the name isos and click create directory now we have our new ISO folder listed in the root of the SATA HDD datastore our next stop is to upload the Ubuntu 2204 desktop ISO I downloaded so I'll click the new isos folder and then click the upload button at the top I will now navigate to and choose my Ubuntu ISO and click open on the top right the data store browser window you can see a progress bar showing the upload in progress and also in the background in the recent tasks pane as well great now that that's done we can see the iso listed in the isos directory all is well here so we'll click close alright let's get our Linux VM built let's head up to Virtual machines in the Navigator pane on the left and now at the top we'll click create register VM this wizard will help us through the process of creating a VM the first option the one we'll be using Create a new virtual machine is for creating a fresh new VM by hand the second option to play a virtual machine from an ovf or OVA file is what you'd use if you download a VM from the internet that was packaged as an ovf or OVA format which is a standardized means of packaging up a VM to be shared and last is register an existing virtual machine which is a way of adding a VM to your host inventory if the VM files already exist on a datastore but aren't registered on your host anyway let's get down and click next to continue our next stop is to give our new VM a name we'll name ours Ubuntu 2204 compatibility defines which generation of esxi this VM will be compatible with typically speaking if you're building VMS for your own host go with the newest version supported so version 8 for us if you're planning on building VMS on your host and exporting them as ovf templates to share with others you might consider an older version for backwards compatibility with older VMware hypervisors we'll leave ours set to 8 and move on next is guest OS family for the best compatibility for our VM we're building we need to tell esxi what host will be running in our VM we'll be building a Linux VM so we'll select Linux next stop is to define the distribution and version of the OS we'll be running in rvm as you can see the list for Linux is very long we'll scroll down and find Ubuntu 64-bit Last Stop on this page is to click next all right time to choose the data story that we want to hold our virtual machines files generally speaking the faster and better performant storage you use the faster and better performance you'll get from your VM makes sense right we'll land this VM on the nvme SSD and then we'll click next now comes the fun stuff under customized settings we get to Define all the virtual machine Hardware we want to provide to our VM this includes the amount of virtual CPUs Ram size of the hard disk USB controllers network interfaces CD images and more there are a ton of additional options within most of the hardware choices for example if you need to Define things like cores versus sockets resource shares or prioritization you can do it we'll avoid a deep dive for now we do however need to add the Ubuntu links ISO we uploaded to act as a CD for the VM so under CD slash DVD drive 1 we'll click the down arrow and select datastore ISO now we're greeted with the familiar data store browser so we'll navigate over to the SATA HDD datastore and then our fresh isos directory click the Ubuntu ISO image we uploaded and then click select now we click next and we land on the final page which is the summary page of our soon to be created Linux VM as we've configured it all looks good so we'll hit finish to get this party started and there it is our freshly created Linux VM let's check it out alright this is the summary page of our new Ubuntu VM you'll see basic configuration and summary details about the VM including the hardware config and current resource consumption right now our VM is off so the only resource it's consuming is storage for its virtual disks let's boot our VM and check it out you can use the power button at the top or you can click the play button in the console window and there we go our first VM is up and running and booting off the iso we've attached just like that great job foreign [Music] check out our playlist over here of other great virtualization videos we've made in the past if you're interested in getting into VMware or virtualization we can help you out [Music]

Channel: 2GuysTek

Views: 22,370

Keywords: how to install VMware ESXi, how to install vmware esxi 8 step by step, how to install vmware esxi 8.0, Install ESXi start to finish, install vmware esxi 8.0, how to setup vmware esxi server, vmware esxi 8 installation, vmware esxi 8 homelab, vmware esxi 8 free, vmware esxi 8 tutorial for beginners, vmware esxi 8.0, vmware esxi 8.0 license key, vmware esxi 8 free license key, homelab ESXi, homelab esxi server, homelab esxi 8, VMware is the best virtualization platform, vmware

Id: FlOJh8hesqA

Length: 29min 15sec (1755 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 28 2022