vSphere 7.0 - How To Install and Configure VMware ESXi 7.0

what is up guys welcome to the sysadmin tutorials youtube channel in march 2020 vmware released vsphere 7.0 and what better way to start than with an esxi 7.0 installation video now i'm going to be doing this a little bit different to my previous esxi videos we're going to be breaking this up into two parts and the first part is going to be concentrating on the actual installation where we'll go through and we'll do a gui installation step by step and then we're going to show you how you can automate that entire process by using a kickstart script so in my lab here i've got a vcenter server and we're going to be doing this as a nested esxi but the same installation steps apply to if you're going to be doing this on a physical server so let's jump straight into it and we'll launch our vcenter server up on screen i have my base vcenter server so i'm just going to log in here with my administrator credentials and we'll press enter now just at the bottom you can see that we have a resource pool called the vsphere 7 and within that we have a vm called esxi 7-1 i'm just going to edit the vm because i want to show you some settings that have selected when you're creating a nested esxi vm so we'll right-click on the virtual machine and we'll select edit settings for the configuration of this virtual machine you can see that we've set the resources to six cpus 12 gig of memory and a 250 gig hard drive we've also added in six adapters where we're going to be pairing each adapter to its specific function so for example we've got adapter 1 and 2 and this is going to be used for management and also for virtual machine traffic adapter 3 and 4 are going to be used for the vmotion network and five and six are going to be used for nfs storage now if we expand the cpu you can see three quarters of the way down that we have an option called hardware virtualization and it's important that you tick this box if you are installing esxi as a nested esxi virtual machine we'll now head on over to the vm options tab and if i just expand general options here you can see that we've got our guest os version set at vmware esxi 6.5 or later now we're going to expand the boot options and we'll just scroll down here and for secure boot we want to untick that so we do not want to enable secure boot and the reason for that is if you have secure boot enabled when you do your automation with the kickstart script it will not run the second half of the script and don't worry we'll go through all that a little bit later on but for now i just have that unticked and the second option is the force efi setup so we're going to click that and we're going to force it to go into the bios during the first power on the reason why we do that is that so it can pause there at that screen and we can mount the cd-rom iso file for esxi so we'll click on ok and now we're going to go ahead and power on our esxi vm so i'll just click on power on i'm going to click on the little window here and i'm going to launch the vmware remote console so we'll click on that and click on ok once the console launches you'll notice that it is paused here in the boot manager which is exactly what we want it to do and we're going to go over to vmrc we're going to select removable devices cd-rom drive 1 and we're going to connect to disk image iso from within here we're going to click on the esxi iso file and that is this file right here you can download that from www.vmware.com so let's make sure that that's selected and we'll click on open now that's going to mount the iso file to this virtual machine we'll click within the window so we've got some control and we'll just use the down arrow and we'll select virtual ide cd-rom drive so press enter on that and as you can see the esxi installer is starting so this is booting from the iso file okay once the installation files have loaded you'll get to this welcome screen so welcome to the vmware esxi 7.0 installation and here we'll just press enter and then you'll have the end user license agreement you can press f11 to accept and continue that within this window we can select our disk where we wish to install esxi and you can see here that it has picked up our 250 gig hard disk so i'm going to press enter on that if you have multiple ones just make sure that you've got the right one highlighted so i've only got one disk there so i'm just going to press enter and we're going to accept us default for the keyboard layout and here we're going to type in a root password and then we're going to type it in again to confirm it once you've typed the password in twice you can then press enter so now the esxi installer has enough information to go through and perform the installation so we can press f11 to begin the install or we can press f9 to go back and make any changes i'm not going to be making any changes so i'm happy to press f11 and continue with the install all right so the installation has completed successfully we can press on enter to reboot and just make sure that you remove the installation media after rebooting otherwise it's going to go through and try to do the install again so we'll press enter and we will reboot the vm okay and here we are at esxi 7.0 so i'm going to press f2 and we're going to type in the password that we set during the installation now the first option we can reconfigure the root password but i'm going to go down to configure management network and press enter and if i just press enter on network adapters you're going to see the list of adapters that we went through when i edited the virtual machine so these are the physical adapters and we've got vmnik 0 selected and you can see that with the little cross on the left hand side and what that means is that this is going to be the network card that we set up the management ip address on so i'm just going to press on escape the next option is we can set a vlan for the management network and as you can see on the right hand side it is not set by default so you can press enter on that and just set the vlan number if you like we'll go down to ipv4 configuration and press enter now in our setup we're not going to be disabling ipv4 we're not going to be using dhcp for our management network we're going to be setting a static ip address so we'll go down to set static ipv4 address and network configuration and then we'll click the down arrow again and we're going to set 192.168.1.216. and for my subnet mask it's going to be a slash 24 which is 255.255.255.0 so i'll type that into subnet mask and lastly for the default gateway i'm going to type in 192.168.1.1 once all your ip information is entered in we can just press enter and next up we'll go down to ipv6 configuration and press enter for the ipv6 configuration i'm going to be disabling it so i'm just going to make sure i've got disable ipv6 and then in brackets restart required selected and i just press the spacebar that's going to select disable ipv6 and we will press enter for our dns configuration we'll press enter on this we're going to be manually specifying our dns entries here so we'll just press the down arrow and we'll select use the following dns server addresses and host name so i'll press spacebar and we'll go down to primary dns server and my primary dns server in this network is 192.168.1.101. i don't have a secondary dns or an alternate so i'm going to skip that and i'm going to go down to hostname and for my host name i'm going to type in esxi 7 hyphen 1. once you have all your information entered you can press enter now we'll move on to custom dns suffixes so i'll press enter on that and for my custom dns suffix i'm going to type in vmlab.local and vmlab.local is part of my windows active directory domain and that runs purely within my lab so therefore i'm going to use vmlab.local as my suffix so i'll press enter and then we'll press escape to go back to the last menu because we've disabled ipv6 it's going to ask to reboot the host so i'm just going to press y on that to reboot now and then we'll come back we'll log in and we'll have a look at the rest of the configuration menus so i'll just press y and the host is going to restart okay the host has restarted so we're going to press f2 and we're going to log in with our root username and password now after configure management network we have restart management network where we can restart the management network services we can then go to test management and network if we press enter on that option it's going to first try to ping your default gateway and then secondly your dns server and it's also going to try to resolve the hostname esxi 7-1 so we'll press enter on that we can see here for the results that it was successful in pinging the default gateway primary dns server and also the host name so the host name was esxi 7-1 but because we have a dns suffix of vmlab.local it actually did try to ping esxi 7-1.vmlab.local and i do have a forward lookup zone set up already in my active directory domain controller so therefore that was successful so i'm just going to click on or press enter now we'll move down and enter into network restore options this option allows you to restore your network to the default settings which is back to dhcp so if there's anything that goes wrong with your setup of your network and you can't get to your host for whatever reason you can come into this area and you can restore your network settings back to default and that's pretty handy without having to reinstall the whole esxi operating system again so i'm going to press escape we then have our keyboard configuration where we can change the layout if we like but if you remember during the setup wizard we did set us default so i'm happy with that selection and i'm going to leave it on us default we'll then move down into troubleshooting options and we'll press enter in this option the first option here is to enable the esxi shell if i just press enter on this option it will go ahead and enable that so i'm going to do that now and to enter into the esxi shell i just press alt f1 and here i log in with my root username and password and here i have it i'm logged into the esxi shell so i'm just going to type in exit and then i'm going to press alt f2 to go back to the gui i'm going to leave the esxi shell disabled so i'm going to press enter again with the next option we can enable ssh and that'll allow us with a tool such as putty to establish an ssh session to the esxi host and access the cli before i enable that i'm going to go to modify esxi shell and ssh timeouts because as soon as you enable either the esxi shell or enable ssh this option becomes grayed out so i'll press enter here the options that you have available here are availability timeout and idle timeout so you can just set a number for the minutes or you can set it as zero to disable any timeouts at all because this is a lab system i'm going to leave it on zero so i'm just going to press enter now we'll go back up and we'll enable ssh so i'll press enter on this option the next option is to modify the direct console user interface idle timeout so that's the console that we're on here if we press enter on this you can see that after 10 minutes it is gonna log me off and i will need to log on again so this is very handy if you open up a console session and then you walk away to do something else for security reasons it is going to log you out and then you'll have to re-enter your username and password again so i'm going to leave this on the default of 10 minutes and we'll press enter the last option here is it allows us to restart management agents the only times that we had to restart the management agents is when i've seen a management agent crash and i had to go on and log a vmware support ticket for it but basically what it did was it disconnected the host from vcenter so vcenter is the overlaying management tool for esxi hosts and also introduces about a thousand other features that come in and complete the vsphere environment so i had to come in here restart the management agents and then the agents fired up and it established or re-established a connection back to to vcenter so that option is there if you do need to use it we can go ahead and press escape next we have the view system logs and we can view the system logs for syslog vm kernel config management agent virtual center agent and also vmware esxi observation log or vob d to view the system logs you just press the number of the log that you require so if we want to have a look at vm kernel we'll press number two and here we can use the up and down arrow to scroll through the logs if you want to search on a particular entry you can press the forward slash and then you can enter in a term there so as an example we'll enter in 64-bit and press enter and you can see that it's highlighted the 64-bit entries and then you can just press on n to go next to quit out of this you press q and we'll then move on to view support information here we have two pages of information we have our serial number our license number and some certificate information on page one if we move to page two by pressing page down on the keyboard we then have some additional information such as the service tag and also some firmware information of the server hardware the last option that we have here on the left hand side is reset system configuration and this is going to reset the whole esxi host back to factory defaults to reset the system configuration you can just press enter and just follow the steps to reset all the configuration i'm going to press escape and now we're going to minimize the console because we do not need it anymore and we're going to go into the web gui i'm going to open up a new tab in chrome and to access the web user interface we're just going to go to https colon forward slash forward slash and the management ip address of our esxi host i then get to the certificate warning i'll click on advanced and then i'll click on proceed to the ipa address for the login screen we're going to log in with our root username and password and go ahead and press enter the first window that you'll see when you log in for the first time to your esxi host is going to be the vmware customer experience improvement program and you have the option to opt in or opt out of that i'm going to untick it and click on ok you can see on the front screen that we've got a warning that ssh is enabled and it does recommend to disable it so that's okay because we have gone through and enabled it on purpose and i will show you later on how to ssh into your esxi host next you can see that we are running esxi in evaluation mode you do get 60 days of evaluation so that you can go through and test the product other information that you see here on the home page is the hardware configuration system information and the performance summary for the last hour now we're going to go through and explain a lot more of the options in part two of this video so what we're going to do now is we're going to go through and put in some more configuration steps which we're going to do through the gui and then we're going to move on to automating this whole installation experience on the left hand side we're going to go ahead and click on manage and then within the system tab at the bottom you can see that we've got time and date so we're going to click on that and we're going to go through and set an ntp server so we'll click on edit ntp settings we're going to select use network time protocol for the ntp service startup policy i'm going to drop down that menu and we're going to select start and stopped with host we've entered in here two time pool servers for australia xero.au.pool.ntp.org and also 1.au.pool.ntp.org so i'm going to click on save in vsphere 7 we also do have the option to configure a precision time protocol and that allows sub millisecond time synchronization for this demo though we're going to be just sticking with the ntp server setup so now that we've got that configuration within our host we are going to go to services and we're going to select ntpd we'll right click on that and we'll select start you can see now that the ntp service is running so time synchronization is happening in the background now we're going to go over and set up some networking so on the left hand side we'll click networking and we'll click on virtual switches you can see here that we have v-switch 0. if i select v-switch 0 and i click on edit settings you can see here that we have one uplink which is vmnic0 so that's one physical network card now we're going to add a second network card to this v-switch so i'll click cancel and we'll click on add uplink now if you remember back to the configuration of the virtual machine for esxi 7 we did have a number of virtual network cards and the first two network cards were going to be responsible for the management network and also for the virtual machine network so that's what we're setting up here and that's why we've selected vmnex0 and vmnic1 so i'll click on save and now we're going to add two more v-switches so we'll click on add standard virtual switch and for the name i'm just going to call it a vswitch1 [Music] now this is going to be our vmotion network so i'm going to set the mtu to 9000 and that will allow us to use jumbo frames you can see here that for uplink one it has selected the next available nick which is vm nik ii we're also going to add in vm nick three so we'll click on add uplink and for uplink 2 we have vmnic3 so we'll click on add and the last v-switch we're going to add is v-switch 2 and that one's going to be responsible for nfs storage so we'll click on add standard virtual switch for the v-switch name we'll type in v-switch 2 and for the mtu we're also going to set this at 9000. you can see here that it's selected the next available network card again which is vmnic 4 we're going to click on add uplink and we're also going to add in vmnik 5 as the second uplink so we'll click on add so now we have our three virtual switches set up the next thing we're going to do is we're going to go to vm kernel nix and you can see here the vmk or vm kernel 0 is the management ip address so that's what we're connected to now 192 168 1.216 we're now going to add in the vmotion vm kernel nick and also a vm kernel nic for nfs storage so we'll click on add vm kernel nick for the port group we're going to type in vmotion and for the virtual switch we're going to select a v switch one we don't need to enter a vlan id here as for my lab network it is all set on the switching in the back end so i'm just going to leave that on zero however for the mtu we're also going to set this at 9000 the ipv version we're going to believe on ipv4 only and for ipv4 settings we're going to click on static and we'll just expand ipv4 settings and for the ip address we're going to type in 192.168.10.216. so that's the subnet for my vmotion network and the subnet mask for that network is 255.255.255.0 for the tcpip stack we're going to drop that down and we're going to select vmotion stack now that we've got all our vmotion information entered we'll click on create now we're going to head back to the top and we're going to click on add vm kernel nick again for the port group we're going to type in nfs and for the virtual switch we're going to drop down this menu and select vswitch 2. we don't need to select any vlan id again all the v-landing and everything is done in the back end on my switches however for the mtu we are going to type in here 9000 as well for ipv4 settings we're going to click on static and we'll expand the settings and for the address i'm going to type in 192.168.2.216. and that network also has a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 for the tcpip stack we can leave this on default tcp stack and for services we don't need to select anything here so we'll go ahead and click on the create button and there we have it we have our three networks set up now the nfs network is going to allow us to bring in storage from an external array using the nfs protocol and of course the nfs storage array needs to be on the same network so that 192 168 network that we set up previously now for the vmotion network that's going to allow us to seamlessly move virtual machines between esxi hosts whether the virtual machine is powered on or powered off now to do that we need to be running vcenter server and esxi host will be connected into vcenter server and it will have it under its management umbrella but don't worry we'll be covering that in a future video now as i mentioned before we are going to go through and have a look at the rest of the settings of esxi and we're even going to go on and install and create a virtual machine but for now being part one we just wanted to get our esxi server set up and configured and we've done that with the gui setup method now we're going to move on to the scripted and automated method of setting up esxi and this comes in very handy if you need to go through and set up multiple esxi servers so what i'm going to do is i'm going to power off this esxi server i'm going to delete the hard drive i'm going to install a new hard drive and then we're going to take a look at the scripted install so the way that works is that when esxi boots up it's going to pull down the kickstart script and it's going to read all the configuration information within that script and apply them during the configuration so the scripted installation is completely hands off we don't need to go through and click on anything or going through the gui method or anything like that all the configuration is read from that script so i'm going to go ahead and power this down delete the hard drive install the new hard drive and then we will come back just when we're about to power on the virtual machine okay guys we're back and as you can see up on screen we have logged into vcenter and down the bottom here we have our esxi 7-1 virtual machine so what i'm going to be using is i'm going to be using a tool called http file server and if you've been following along in my previous tutorials you'll see that i use this tool quite a bit and what it does is it allows me to create a http server and i can just place a file within that server and use it as a download location so for example if i go into my folder here you can see that i've got the kickstart script ks.cfg located here and then if we open up http file server on the left hand side if i click on ks.cfg you can see that it gives me a url here with the ip address slash and then the file name ks.cfg and that's what we're going to be using when we boot up our esxi server and point it to this kickstart script now what i'll do is i'll provide the link to the http file server application in the description below of this video but for now let's go over to our ks.cfg file and have a look what's inside so i'm going to edit this with notepad plus plus and this is what the kickstart script file looks like now don't worry about copying it line for line because i'm going to be posting this up on github and you can go and grab it there but now if we take a look and see how this kickstart script is constructed you can see right from the top there that we go through and accept the end user license agreement we set the root password for esxi we then install on the first disk and we've set it to override vmfs which we don't really need to override it because this is going to be a brand new disk anyway and then we go on and we set the static ip address of our esxi host so the static ip address that i'm going to be using is 192.168.1.215 and then you can also see there my netmask my default gateway and my dns name server after it's done that it's going to reboot the esxi host and then when it comes back up online we are going to go through and set the dns suffix we're going to disable ipv6 and then we're going to enable ssh so we're going to enable the ssh service within esxi we're going to enable ntp and set two ntp servers there the servers that we're going to be setting are xero.au.pool.ntp.org and also 1.au.pool.ntp.org following on from that we're going to create the v-switches and then we're going to set the v-switches to an empty u of 9000 and if i just scroll down a little bit here the next component will be adding physical nicks to our v switches and then we'll go on and we'll create the vm kernel ports once it's done all the networking setup we're going to put the host into maintenance mode and then we're going to do a reboot and the reason why we need to go through and reboot it is because we've gone through and disabled ipv6 so i'm going to minimize notepad plus plus and we'll minimize these other windows we'll minimize http file server and we'll go back to the virtual machine we'll right click on the virtual machine and we'll click on edit settings and we'll just go to vm options we'll go to boot options and we're going to select force efi setup so during the next boot we'll force entry into the efi setup screen remember also for this to work we need to disable secure boot so make sure you don't have secure boot enabled and we'll click on ok now that we've set our vm to boot into the efi setup we can simply right click on the virtual machine select power and power on and now we want to launch the remote console so make sure you select remote console and not web console so we'll click on that now so you can see here that we are in the efi setup screen now we'll go up to the vmrc menu we'll click on that select removable devices cd-rom drive connect to disk image file iso and we want to select our esxi iso image here so i'll select mine and we'll click on open and now i'll click in the screen so i can move the cursor around and we'll select to boot from the ide cd-rom drive now when i press on enter it's going to start the esxi setup and during this time we want to press shift o so i'll press enter now and shift o so you can see down the bottom that it says cd-rom boot space run weasel and here we're going to point esxi over to our http file server and we're also going to give it a temporary ip address so what we're going to type in here is ks equals and then the url location to our ks file and next we'll give it an ip address so we type in ip equals and then the ip address and this ip address is just an ip address so that it can communicate to our http file server next we'll enter in our netmask so press space and we'll enter in netmask equals and then the net mask we can also type in here the default gateway so i'll just press space and gateway equals and then my gateway ip and lastly we can enter in our name server so we just press space and we type name server equals and the name server ip address once we have all that information entered we can then just simply press enter and the esxi installer will begin now we play the waiting game now you can see here that it's reading the installation script and by default it's going to try to resolve a dhcp ip address so you will get this warning up on screen and this is going to time out and then after it's just going to simply continue automatically so here you can see that it did not get an ip address from the dhcp server so we can just wait here or we can press on enter to continue since this is a fully automated install i'm not going to press on enter i'm just going to let it timeout and here we go the esxi installation continues so now the install has been complete or the first stage of it so it's rebooting now and here we have the kickstart script setting up the second part of our installation which is enabling ssh the ntp servers the vswitches and the vm kernel interfaces and here's the second reboot and there you have it we have our esxi server set up exactly the same way as what we did during the manual way so now we'll log into our esxi server and we'll just have a little bit of a look around and see what the script has set up so i'll minimize the console and we'll open up a new tab in chrome and we're going to go to https the ip address of the esxi server we'll accept the certificate and we'll log in here with root and the password again you have the option here to join the vmware customer experience improvement program i'm going to untick that and we'll click on ok so you can see here on the first screen that ssh is enabled on this host so that was from the kickstart file if we click on manage you can see here that our two ntp servers have been set and ntp service status is running if we click on networking you can see here that we have our three v switches set up and if i right click on v switch 0 and select edit we can see that this switch has two physical nicks connected and this one has an mtu of 1500 which is correct if i cancel that and edit v switch one you can see here that we have the mtu 9000 and we also have two physical nic uplinks which is correct and the last one v switch is two we'll edit that and it also has mtu 9000 and two physical nics which is what we had in our kickstart file so i'll cancel that and now we'll go to vm kernel nyx and here we have our three vm kernel nik setup so we have the management network our nfs or storage network and we have our vmotion network as well and just on the right side here under ipv4 addresses we have those ip addresses for those vm kernel ports so as you can see using the automated installation of esxi with the kickstart script dramatically reduces your installation window we've gone down to a matter of minutes as opposed to i think it maybe took us about 20 minutes or so to go through and manually install that first esxi server so you can really see the benefits of that when we come through to install or if you have to install multiple esxi servers so you don't want to be sitting there for 20 minutes installing each one and that's where you can really use this automated installation method okay guys that completes this esxi 7.0 installation video in part two we're going to go through and have a look at more settings within esxi 7.0 and we're also going to set up your first virtual machine if you have any questions whatsoever please leave them in the comments below and i'll do my best at getting through and answering them as quick as i can if you like this video please give it a big thumbs up and if you're not already a subscriber please hit that subscribe button and be the first to know whenever i release a new video alright guys that completes this video we hope to see you again in part two take care and bye for now

Channel: sysadmintutorials

Views: 46,651

Keywords: vmware, vsphere, vsphere 7.0, esxi, esxi 7.0, how to, virtualization, hypervizor, virtual machine, vswitch, vmkernel, ntp, ssh, kickstart, automate, script, vmnic, vmotion, secure boot, remote console

Id: O0Xt_YrLrBA

Length: 35min 10sec (2110 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 26 2020