VMware 7 Home Lab - Installing ESXi

hey everybody and welcome back to the vmware 7.0 uh lab setup uh showed you some of the hardware i'm going to be using last episode or last video whatever you call these and today we're going to install uh vmware esxi version 7 here in the lab i'm doing this live did a couple test runs it should be good but you never know what's going to happen so let's start out by where am i getting this stuff from and i've got a couple options here you can get a free vmware account just by signing up at vmware.com and get the esxi demo right there it's actually a full unlimited trial it'll give you esxi without any issues but it does have limited features you can't get vsphere or you can get a vsphere trial but it expires after so many days alternatively and what i'm using today is vmug advantage so for a couple hundred bucks a year or actually a little bit less than that um if you get a discount that's often available um you can get v-mug advantage for one year and it gives you a whole year worth of vmware software test drive you can't use this in production but you can use it in the home lab and get a lot of use out of it so that's what i've been doing and it works great then you don't have to be limited by features or be limited by refreshing your environment all the time when the demo runs out so that's what i'm doing and what i did today is downloaded that software and then opened up rufus i don't actually know how to say this um no i don't want to look for updates okay let's bring this into the screen if you're not familiar with this it's a fantastic usb bootable tool so this will take any iso image and it'll make it bootable to a usb and that comes in handy all the time so i would just grab the let's find out where i put this thing here under my downloads on my desktop in my lab um so my file is called this vmware vm visor version seven open to that and for my purposes um i don't actually have a usb device in there so it's not going to let me go any further than this but i made sure i picked gpt uh because i want an efi boot for this uh desktop that i'm using and then i just wrote it to the disk so that's how i got the bootable usb that i'm about to be using so let's switch over to that now and take a look at that that's actually a little bit farther ahead than we're supposed to be let's power this guy down power back up again and we'll reinstall it to show you how it's done so i believe i've got to do f9 on this one to boot there we go and i want to boot to my sandisk extreme here let's put that up and there it goes this is going to take a few minutes and one thing i do want to know is when booting this up i um vmware notified me that i did not have virtualization support turned on on this hardware so i had to go to the bios and turn on virtualization support typically a home computer like what i'm using here would not have it on by default and that's something you're definitely going to want to turn on before you actually go to to use it it's not going to let you do any virtualization with that turned off let's see where we're at all right it's making progress there is no way to speed this ahead this is a live video so we're just gonna have to deal with the fact that it's it's real time here um i am using a uh if you didn't see the previous video an hp 8300 ultra slim so this thing is tiny currently as you can see it's only got about eight gigs of ram available to it and an i5 so it's not the most powerful thing but just going through the install process alone is a great knowledge so even if you don't end up deploying a lot of vms to this thing you're just going to get knowledge by simply going through the installation process getting familiar with how to create bootable media how like what is vmware and how do i install it and a little bit of networking along with that too because you'll see shortly um this thing can be on dhcp or you can go to static ip we're going to have to browse to the web to configure it so there's a lot going on here and just going through this process even if you don't utilize it a lot is going to help quite a bit so here's the the boot up menu that says welcome to vmware 7. and it's going to give you a little bit of a warning in a second here but let's continue and we have to hit f11 at this stage and now it's scanning all of my devices so right now i do not have the device that i want to install vmware installed and what i want to do is install vmware here on a usb stick so if you look here this is just a standard usb stick this is not even usb 3. although i do recommend it this is just a usb 2. it's like a 4 gig it's really old and small i had it laying around and i'm going to install this on this computer right now and then i'm going to hit refresh so we hit f5 to refresh this is nice because if i am booting off usb you can see the sandisk there if i had two of the same brand about the same size that i was booting you know that i was going to use for this purpose it would be hard to tell them apart so one thing you can do is look at that vm hba32 id there after you put in the second one and hit refresh and then you'll know which one was already there which one i'm booting off of and which one wasn't there already which one i want to install on i had that problem early on when i was doing several of these installs so there's my new old old one the lexar let's go ahead and continue with that and it sees that i already have this installed in here because i did that in the trial run so i'm just going to reinstall over the top of it normally you don't see that window and it asks for the state and then the password so for my labs i don't get fancy i just use the word password with a capital p the number one and an exclamation point hopefully those match all right we're back in business okay so this is the warnings i was talking about it's basically just vmware saying we're not guaranteeing that your cpu is going to be supported in the future and make sure that you have hardware virtualization turned on so it's interesting i have already turned it on on this one but it's saying that it's not a feature of the cpu although i know that i can do hardware virtualization on this cpu so let's continue and see what happens it's not going to stop us from installing either way there we go so again this is going to take quite a few minutes there's no way to speed it up since we're doing this live but um let's take a look here at my current home lab perfect no let's go back to this one okay so while that's installing i might as well show you around a little bit on my current so this is another one identical unit i have set up um i already have it configured and we can log into this and just take a quick look around while we're waiting for them to finish up so i'm not even sure what virtual machines i have on here let's take a look really quick but this is what the user interface looks like right you're going to a web browser you're going to the ip address and the rest of this is filled in automatically as you can see the ui pound slash host and then you get this kind of ui that allows you to see all sorts of things that are going on it's pretty cool right how much cpu cpu do i have and how much am i using cpu is used the least unless you have a really cpu intense application uh you're not going to really be limited by cpu memory is probably the thing that you're going to need the most of especially if you do multiple vms that's what's going to be used at first and then if you're running on an ssd like i am here you're not going to have any storage performance issues but you may have storage capacity issues as you spin up more vms so just try to keep them as small as possible let's check on our progress here about 64 65 there it's cruising right through all right let's keep looking so as you can see this one does have 16 gigs of ram a little bit less than that usable and um these cpus are apparently four core which is kind of cool so um but yeah this is pretty much what vmware esxi looks like so this is not vsphere vsphere is a technology that is put on top of esxi that takes several esxi boxes and lets you manage them together and that is very possible because then it lets you take like a vm let's say this is a domain controller a one here for test it would let me move this domain controller from one physical server to another while it's running that's called vmotion and that's pretty a pretty basic operation in a production environment so well it's nice to test here with just this one box um if you're going to want to go and build something in production you're going to want multiple boxes and you're going to want vsphere it's really nice all right so before we get too much farther ahead nope we're still slowly moving at 70 percent so all i've done here um when this is booted up is i right click and say create vm and then it's just this nice little wizard that brings you through um and then a nice thing about having a home lab is you don't have to worry about if you break it and if you do break it you don't have to worry because you just you know spend the time research fix it rebuild it and move forward so they're really this really is a great place to learn and we hit next on new virtual machine see there's a couple options here let's just put in the word pesto one for this guy and i like to leave a lot of this the same we do have to pick our os let's do windows on this one and then it gives you lots of choices so windows 10 64-bit i probably have an iso for that laying around let's see i don't want to turn on security for this and we'll put it on data store one this is the local hard drive on this computer and there's no reason not to leave that alone now we can pick kind of since this is virtual we can pick how many what resources we dedicate to this machine how much memory i want to it i'll give it four gigs how much how much space typically in a lab environment i'm actually going to pick thin provisioned which means that it's only going to actually utilize the amount of disk it needs even though i can give this thing 100 gigabytes it's not going to use 100 gigabytes when i install windows it's just going to use whatever space windows takes to install and then it'll grow up to 100 gigabytes as it needs to but the windows os that i install here will always see 100 gigabytes available all right and the other thing that i would probably do is change that network adapter so by default vmware is giving you a highly compatible e1000e network adapter you want vmx net 3 the best performing network adapter unless you're doing linux then you may want to do one of these older style because they are more compatible to give you linux internet capabilities right away but if possible especially with windows i always do the vmx net threes okay and everything else i'm just gonna leave the same and i think that's it it's just gonna confirm so it's gonna build that vm for me let's see where our install is at perfect it's done so remove installation media before rebooting and reboot okay enter watch this guy boot up and it does take quite a few minutes for vmware to boot cold but we'll see the process here right loading hypervisor loading vmware esxi and then it starts booting and this isn't the normal loading screen for vmware this is what you would normally see not too exciting there so let's give that a few minutes to boot up uh yeah because it's oh we'll watch the next screen it's going to go to a graphical interface in a second and then from there it's still going to take several more minutes and if something was to go wrong it would tell you at one of these menus here it would tell you what the issue is but already you can see that it's seen my eight gigs of ram my cpu the brand of the computer right the hp 8300 and it's actually moving pretty pretty fast here you're seeing the version the esxi7 and i have this plugged into my network already my normal home network normally as you saw with my lab here this is my lab network my 10.0.0.21 that is not my normal home network i have it vlandoff so this one right here for testing purposes is going to be on my home network it's going to get a 192 address and i'm not going to give it a static ip right now but it will get a dhcp address automatically from my home router and anybody who is looking for a nice home runner solution i highly recommend pfsense take a quick look at that here this is my psn's dashboard of course it's going to give me the ssl warning and this is pretty fantastic it's a home router that um well it's an enterprise class piece of software runs on i can't remember the version of unix that it runs on but it is awesome and you can install it on any home computer so i have a really old home computer that this is installed on right now and as you can see it's giving me graphical interfaces on all my my lan my public my lab i've got a security network that i'm not really using right now and you can vlan off this thing you can if you install multiple nics you can hand those off to different networks this is very powerful this is going to have the same kind of feature set that you'd get with any real like a professional cisco unit so i highly recommend it and i've actually posted some previous videos about how to configure that as well so now we've got this thing fully configured as you can see here my ip address is the 1921681.115 i'm going to browse to that in just a second but if we wanted to change this ip what we would do is hit f2 down in the lower left you see f2 to customize we have to put in our password that we entered and then it brings you to the customization menu and you can change a lot of stuff here what we'll be doing is configuring the management network and then we'd be configuring ipv4 for this purpose and we would say set static and then we would go in and fill in those ip values for whatever we want but we're not going to do that today all right so exit exit brings us back to this main menu and this is how it says so after you install vmware it just sits here looking like this all the time so vmware operates headless it's kind of like it's not like hyper-v installed or vmware workstation where you actually have an os that you can use and then you also have access to vms this is a complete hypervisor all it does is host vms and you can't even manage it through this console you have to manage it remotely through the web so let's go there now so that's uh 115 it looks like five all right again uh there it goes it gives us a warning about the ssl certificate because it's locally signed so we don't care about that we know what we're doing and then it's going to ask us to log in so the password the username is always root and then the password is whatever you set it to be i use that password number one exclamation point with the capital p that meets all the credential requirements i don't want lastpass to remember that right now because i'm going to change it but um yeah you can choose whether or not you want to send your logs to vmware and then right now you see right out the gate this license will expire in 60 days from an evaluation mode so back on vmware's website i don't want to scroll up but i do have a key that's available to me there that would give me again unlimited use to this vm on vmug which is the key i'll end up using i have a key that will give me a 365-day trial to it but then also i have keys for vcenter which gives me more abilities so right now we're logged in to the unit directly it's got an ip again we can see how much ram and cpu it has and you can see with only eight gigs i'm already with only vmware installed it's already using a gig and a quarter so it's using quite a bit of memory just to run itself and i've only got you know six just over six gigs free to run a vm that's not a lot of space i mean you could definitely run um four or five vms especially smaller ones you can run them with pretty low ram and and cram them in there but the performance is going to suck and you're just not going to have a good experience so the most ram that you can get in the most room that you can afford is the way that you want to go and that's why i upgraded these to 16 and the 16 is the maximum that this hardware format can do which is kind of a limitation so think about that when you're planning what hardware you want to use for your lab and we already kind of went through everything else here i'm not going to go into anything more in this one so in a future video i'll try to cover things like how to actually get media onto esxi and then how to build out a vm and maybe some more networking stuff on top of that so any questions post them in the comments and i hope this was helpful thanks

Channel: SysAdmin Show

Views: 3,609

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: PKa7RJrTPs8

Length: 20min 43sec (1243 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 16 2020