WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.000 Welcome back to vSphere 8 in the real world. Now we're going to discuss ESXi installation. 00:00:06.960 --> 00:00:13.840 So ESXi is what's known as a Type 1 hypervisor or a bare-metal hypervisor. There's Type 1 and Type 2. 00:00:13.840 --> 00:00:19.120 Whereas Type 2, we might have Windows or Linux installed already. We might install something 00:00:19.120 --> 00:00:24.639 like VMware Workstation on top of the Windows operating system or the Linux operating system 00:00:24.639 --> 00:00:31.360 with a Type 1 hypervisor or a bare-metal hypervisor like ESXi. There's nothing installed 00:00:31.360 --> 00:00:37.840 on this hardware already. So we have a brand new server. It's just bare-metal and we install the 00:00:37.840 --> 00:00:44.080 ESXi operating system onto that server. And that is why it's referred to as a bare-metal hypervisor 00:00:44.080 --> 00:00:49.439 because there's nothing on there before we install ESXi. This becomes the platform on which we're 00:00:49.439 --> 00:00:54.799 going to create virtual machines. So we're going to, within ESXi, we're going to configure virtual 00:00:54.799 --> 00:00:59.439 networking. We're going to configure storage. We're going to, you know, all the different things that 00:00:59.439 --> 00:01:04.959 we will need access to for our virtual machines. And then we're going to actually create the VM 00:01:04.959 --> 00:01:10.320 itself, right? We'll assign it CPU. We'll assign it disk. We'll assign it networking. We'll assign 00:01:10.320 --> 00:01:17.440 it memory. And the VM is going to use the resources from the ESXi host that the ESXi host has available 00:01:17.440 --> 00:01:23.199 to that VM. The ESXi host is going to control that access to those resources. So we might 00:01:23.199 --> 00:01:30.000 assign our VM 16 gigs of RAM and ESXi is going to control that access to that RAM. If the ESXi 00:01:30.000 --> 00:01:35.440 needs to, it can take some of that physical memory away from the VM and use, you know, things like 00:01:35.440 --> 00:01:40.720 swab or page files in order to control access and make sure all the VMs are running, you know, 00:01:40.720 --> 00:01:46.800 as best as they can with the resources available on the host. The ESXi hypervisor is what's controlling 00:01:46.800 --> 00:01:56.160 that access to those physical resources on that box. So requirements for installing ESXi 8. 00:01:57.279 --> 00:02:05.680 So for CPUs, we want at least two cores on there. You want to have your nx.xd, you know, 00:02:06.400 --> 00:02:12.800 hypervisor support enabled on your processors. At least 8 gigs of RAM. Virtual hardware will 00:02:12.800 --> 00:02:19.360 be enabled. Your VP will be enabled. At least one gig network adapter. Really, that's the bare 00:02:19.360 --> 00:02:24.800 minimum just to manage that host. Nowadays, it's very common to see hosts that might have 00:02:24.800 --> 00:02:31.839 two or four or more 10-gig NICs, 25-gig NICs are very, very common nowadays. It might depend on 00:02:31.839 --> 00:02:36.160 what kind of storage you're using. If you're using iSCSI storage, you might have a couple, 00:02:36.160 --> 00:02:41.919 at least 25-gig NICs available for the iSCSI storage. And then your VMs might be running on, 00:02:41.919 --> 00:02:49.039 you know, two or three or four 10- to 25-gig NICs for the VM access to the network. And then 00:02:49.039 --> 00:02:54.080 if you have some one-gig interfaces on there also, you might manage the host through there, 00:02:54.080 --> 00:03:00.080 but you'll probably use 10- or 25-gig NICs for things like vMotion and things like that as well. 00:03:00.080 --> 00:03:06.720 All right. So at least one gig adapter just to manage the host. All right. You're going to need 00:03:06.720 --> 00:03:13.360 at least 32 gigabytes of disk space, and that's minimum in order to install the operating system. 00:03:13.360 --> 00:03:16.000 You probably want a little bit more than that, but you want to be able to have things like 00:03:16.000 --> 00:03:21.279 login enabled. The more, you know, VMs that you're running, the more logging you might have, 00:03:21.279 --> 00:03:25.679 so you might need more additional space for things like that. Now, that is only to install 00:03:25.679 --> 00:03:32.080 the operating system. You're not going to want to create virtual machines on that same disk 00:03:32.080 --> 00:03:36.399 that you've installed your OS on. You want a disk dedicated to the operating system or a disk if 00:03:36.399 --> 00:03:41.199 you want them mirrored, dedicated to the operating system. And then you'll have other storage that 00:03:41.199 --> 00:03:45.759 you'll use for the VMs. You might have local disks on that machine that you're using for something 00:03:45.759 --> 00:03:50.960 like vSAN, or you might have some kind of shared storage of iSCSI or Fiber Channel, some kind of 00:03:50.960 --> 00:03:56.720 SAN on the network. You could even use NFS. NFS has been supported for virtual machines for quite 00:03:56.720 --> 00:04:02.080 a while, I think since around like version 6 or 6.5, it's been supported. All right. So you can 00:04:02.080 --> 00:04:06.639 see some links here where you can go and see what processors are supported by, you know, EFXI, 00:04:07.360 --> 00:04:11.440 other platforms, you know, resources that are available, like HBAs and things like that are 00:04:11.440 --> 00:04:21.279 all available and supported. So it's very, very common now, you know, most servers will have some 00:04:21.279 --> 00:04:26.320 kind of remote access cards that you can use to access those servers as if you're sitting in front 00:04:26.320 --> 00:04:30.320 of them. So it's not as common anymore that you're going to want to have a crash cart and go around 00:04:30.320 --> 00:04:36.079 and plug into servers in order to get to the console and, you know, type keyboard commands in 00:04:36.079 --> 00:04:40.160 and things like that. Most likely you're going to use either a DRAC or an ILO. If you have DELs, 00:04:40.160 --> 00:04:45.760 you have a DRAC, HPs, you have an ILO. If you have some other third-party server, they might have 00:04:45.760 --> 00:04:50.640 their own management cards in there, but the most common two are DRACs with your DELs and ILOs with 00:04:50.640 --> 00:04:54.399 your HPs. And this is just showing the different versions of firmware that are supported for those 00:04:54.399 --> 00:05:04.239 kinds of cards. So some things to consider when you are installing ESXi without a local disk, 00:05:04.239 --> 00:05:08.399 then you can deploy ESXi without local disk. You'll do what's called an auto-deploy, 00:05:08.959 --> 00:05:16.000 or you can also install them on a remote disk, meaning if I have, for example, fiber channel, 00:05:16.000 --> 00:05:23.040 I could use a LUN target on my SAN as the destination for I'm going to install my ESXi. 00:05:23.040 --> 00:05:28.959 So that's just something to consider. It's very, very common now that people have a card in the 00:05:28.959 --> 00:05:34.959 server they install the OS on. Booting from SAN is supported. You do see it sometimes. 00:05:34.959 --> 00:05:39.119 The advantage of doing a boot from SAN is, like, for example, let's say you have a blade chassis 00:05:39.679 --> 00:05:43.920 and you want to swap out a blade for one reason. Either the blade's gone bad or, 00:05:43.920 --> 00:05:47.839 you know, you're upgrading or something like that. You can take a blade out. You can put a 00:05:47.839 --> 00:05:53.440 new blade in. You can configure the HBA on that blade to boot from that LUN that the old blade 00:05:53.440 --> 00:05:57.760 was booting from, and it comes up and it's the same host all over again. So there are advantages 00:05:57.760 --> 00:06:05.119 to doing a boot from SAN. It's just not something you see a ton of. Cisco UCS, you see that kind of 00:06:05.119 --> 00:06:12.320 quite a bit. Other vendors, you don't see it quite as often. So performance recommendations, 00:06:12.640 --> 00:06:16.799 you know, let's say at least you want to have at least eight gigs of RAM. Again, 00:06:16.799 --> 00:06:22.320 that's just kind of run the operating system. If you want to actually run VMs, you're going to have 00:06:22.320 --> 00:06:27.839 to have a lot more RAM than that. So if your VMs, you know, are going to have 16 gigs of RAM each, 00:06:27.839 --> 00:06:33.200 you're going to want to have 16 gigs of RAM available per VM plus some overhead for that, 00:06:33.200 --> 00:06:37.440 right? And how much overhead will depend upon how many virtual CPUs you assign, how much RAM you 00:06:37.440 --> 00:06:43.279 assign. Each VM will have, the bigger the VM, the more overhead that VM has. So a 16 gig and, 00:06:43.279 --> 00:06:47.200 say, four virtual CPUs, you might need to have like 16 and a half gigs of RAM or something like 00:06:47.200 --> 00:06:54.000 that per VM. Now, it's possible to do what's called oversubscription, where maybe all the 00:06:54.000 --> 00:07:01.040 VMs running total on my host equals, you know, 64 gigs of RAM, but my host only has 56 gigs of RAM 00:07:01.040 --> 00:07:07.279 or something like that in there. So I oversubscribe because I need RAM for the EFX host itself to run 00:07:07.359 --> 00:07:11.519 then for the VMs on top of that. So that 56 gigs, I don't even have that much available because the 00:07:11.519 --> 00:07:19.040 ESXi host needs resources. So I've oversubscribed that host. And what will happen is each VM will 00:07:19.040 --> 00:07:24.160 get a certain amount of RAM, a percentage of what they are assigned, and then the rest will be 00:07:24.160 --> 00:07:28.399 paged to a page file. And page files, obviously, are not going to be anywhere near as fast because 00:07:28.399 --> 00:07:34.799 they're on a hard disk. So they won't be as quick as the actual RAM on the host. So you can do that. 00:07:34.799 --> 00:07:38.799 It's a performance hit. I wouldn't recommend it. Most people don't recommend it. It's very, 00:07:38.799 --> 00:07:44.000 very common to see hosts nowadays with 512 gigs of RAM in them. Some of these big, huge hosts, 00:07:44.000 --> 00:07:50.239 you know, terabytes of RAM are not unheard of at all nowadays in ESXi hosts. Okay. 00:07:50.880 --> 00:07:56.880 For your networking, you want multiple adapters on your host. You want adapters dedicated to things 00:07:56.880 --> 00:08:02.320 like management. You want adapters dedicated to things like vMotion. If you're already fault 00:08:02.320 --> 00:08:06.720 tolerant VMs, you want network adapters dedicated to your fault tolerant network. 00:08:06.720 --> 00:08:12.880 And then you also want adapters dedicated to the VMs themselves. Now, I'm not saying to each VM, 00:08:12.880 --> 00:08:19.679 but you might want a team of VMs. Maybe you have two or three or four adapters in your host that 00:08:19.679 --> 00:08:25.600 are working as a team that all your VMs are running off of. So you need multiple adapters 00:08:25.600 --> 00:08:31.600 on your host. Again, there's the management of the host. vMotion network would want a dedicated 00:08:31.600 --> 00:08:36.000 NIC, at least fault tolerant network. You might want a dedicated NIC for that. And then the VMs 00:08:36.000 --> 00:08:41.359 will also be dedicated NICs. So you want plenty of RAM. You want plenty of CPU. You want plenty 00:08:41.359 --> 00:08:51.359 of network adapters. So some of the considerations, the disk, you don't want the VM stored 00:08:51.359 --> 00:08:56.080 on the same disk as the operating system is installed on. You don't want to get some big, 00:08:56.080 --> 00:09:03.520 huge 14-terabyte drive to install ESXi on and then put VMs on that same disk. You want 00:09:03.520 --> 00:09:10.400 maybe like a small disk for the operating system itself. You see a lot of times you'll get 00:09:11.440 --> 00:09:18.799 256-gig SSDs, and you'll install the operating system on that. And then you might have multiple 00:09:18.799 --> 00:09:25.200 terabyte drives in some kind of array to array, some kind of storage configuration for vSAN or 00:09:25.200 --> 00:09:28.719 something like that. If you're using vSAN, you're not using RAID. This depends on how you're using 00:09:28.719 --> 00:09:38.080 your disks. And put the VMs on separate disks from your operating system. The aligning the sectors, 00:09:38.080 --> 00:09:44.400 that used to be a big consideration when you were installing ESXi and configuring your VMFS 00:09:44.400 --> 00:09:49.359 data stores and creating your virtual disks for your VMs is making sure that you had your sector 00:09:49.359 --> 00:09:54.799 alignment configured correctly. ESXi does that for you now. It's something to maybe be aware of 00:09:54.960 --> 00:09:59.200 that there is that sector alignment happening, but you don't have to worry about doing it. ESXi has 00:09:59.200 --> 00:10:05.200 done that for you, again, I think since like version 6 or so. ESXi has taken care of aligning 00:10:05.200 --> 00:10:09.599 the sectors on the virtual disk with the physical sectors on the physical disk. So it's not something 00:10:09.599 --> 00:10:15.039 that you as an admin have to try and calculate and figure out anymore. All right. For your 00:10:15.039 --> 00:10:21.520 processors, you know, what kind of processors do you want? For the most part, you want processors 00:10:21.520 --> 00:10:27.760 with lots of cores, lots of cache. Of course, the faster the better. But if you're trying to trade 00:10:27.760 --> 00:10:33.200 off what's better, faster or more cores, it depends on what you're running on that host. If you're 00:10:33.200 --> 00:10:39.520 running a very small number of large VMs that need a lot of fast processors, then that's probably 00:10:39.520 --> 00:10:45.039 what your host should have also. If you're running a large number of small VMs, then lots of cores 00:10:45.039 --> 00:10:50.320 are sometimes going to be better for you or oftentimes will be better for you. So it's going 00:10:50.320 --> 00:10:56.880 to depend on your workloads. But as a general rule, lots of cores, lots of cache, and then 00:10:56.880 --> 00:11:00.400 as fast as you can afford to purchase for your host will be good. 00:11:03.520 --> 00:11:07.440 So log files. The log files are going to be stored with the operating system. 00:11:08.239 --> 00:11:13.359 If you have, you know, a very small disk you're installing, like you used to see people installing 00:11:13.359 --> 00:11:19.599 on these 32-gig little SSD drives, you know, SSD cards that were on the motherboard of the servers, 00:11:20.159 --> 00:11:26.559 and the SXI host would log to those, what would happen is they would fill up quick, 00:11:26.559 --> 00:11:30.880 logs have to turn over quick, you wouldn't have the older log data you might be looking for. 00:11:30.880 --> 00:11:38.400 And also VMware, the SXI, would log sometimes too much. And so disks were getting written to 00:11:38.400 --> 00:11:43.840 very frequently, and those little SSD cards were getting worn out. VMware had some fixes for that 00:11:43.840 --> 00:11:48.640 to make that not much of an issue, but SSD cards aren't even supported anymore. So now you're going 00:11:48.640 --> 00:11:55.599 to be installing onto, not little SD cards, but like SSD drives, actual physical storage, not the 00:11:55.599 --> 00:11:59.039 little cards that, you know, slip into a motherboard like you might have like in a digital camera or 00:11:59.039 --> 00:12:05.440 something like that. But you want to make sure you do have plenty of space for your log files. 00:12:05.440 --> 00:12:11.200 You don't want your log files filling up your disk. In reality, the log files on disk really 00:12:11.200 --> 00:12:15.039 actually shouldn't be too much of a concern for you because you should be sending your 00:12:15.039 --> 00:12:20.000 logs to a sys server. And if you have a sys log server, then all log files are going there, 00:12:20.000 --> 00:12:22.960 and you're not going to worry about filling up your drives or them getting overwritten because 00:12:22.960 --> 00:12:28.559 they're all being dumped off to another system. So ideally, sys log server, but if you're not 00:12:28.559 --> 00:12:33.599 using a sys log server, make sure you have enough disk space for your log files to go to. 00:12:36.400 --> 00:12:40.799 So if you're going to do an installation, one of the first things you need to do is you need 00:12:40.799 --> 00:12:45.599 a MyVMware account. So you're going to go to myvmware.com, and you're going to make sure you 00:12:45.599 --> 00:12:50.880 have your login credentials. You're going to log into MyVMware, and then you can go and you can 00:12:50.880 --> 00:12:56.719 look at all the things that you have a subscription to. And you can see your license keys from here. 00:12:56.719 --> 00:13:00.559 You can also, you know, find out what you would, based on your subscriptions, what do you want to 00:13:00.559 --> 00:13:06.159 download. And you can download the ISOs for vCenter. You can download the ISOs for ESXi. 00:13:06.159 --> 00:13:10.880 If you have a subscription to VMware Horizon, you can download the Horizon ISOs from there. 00:13:10.880 --> 00:13:15.520 If you have NSX, then you can download licenses and things like that for NSX from here. 00:13:15.520 --> 00:13:20.239 So myvmware.com is where you're going to go for your license keys, as well as downloading your 00:13:20.239 --> 00:13:26.719 ISOs. Once you've downloaded your ISOs, you're going to want to run an MD5 check against that 00:13:26.719 --> 00:13:31.039 ISO just to make sure that it's downloaded correctly. It's not any kind of corruption. 00:13:31.039 --> 00:13:36.239 You're not going to get a bad installation of ESXi when you go to deploy it onto your physical host. 00:13:38.880 --> 00:13:45.520 So there are three primary different ways you're going to do an installation of ESXi. 00:13:45.520 --> 00:13:50.479 Either you can do an interactive installation, which means you're going to boot from, like, 00:13:50.479 --> 00:13:55.440 the ISO on a thumb drive or something like that. Or if you have a DRAC or an iLO, 00:13:55.440 --> 00:14:00.960 you can mount the ISO into that DRAC or to the iLO device and boot from that ISO. 00:14:01.840 --> 00:14:05.039 If you have five or fewer hosts you're deploying, that might be the quickest, 00:14:05.039 --> 00:14:10.159 easiest way of just getting that done. You can also create scripts. Now, if you're going to deploy 00:14:10.159 --> 00:14:14.880 a large number of hosts, you might not want to sit and hit, you know, next, next, next, 00:14:14.880 --> 00:14:20.159 and OK, and things like that. You might want to automate the deployment, and you might want to 00:14:20.159 --> 00:14:25.840 automate the configuration of certain settings, you know, such as IP addresses and root passwords 00:14:25.840 --> 00:14:30.320 and things like that, right? So you can do a scripted installation. And typically, if you're 00:14:30.320 --> 00:14:35.840 doing over five hosts, that becomes an effective way of doing that. There's also auto-deploy. 00:14:36.960 --> 00:14:44.799 Auto-deploy will allow you to basically boot up the host, do a PXE boot. It will get information 00:14:44.799 --> 00:14:51.679 from, like, the network DHCP can tell it where is my PXE server at. It will go connect, get that 00:14:51.679 --> 00:15:00.000 information, pull over the operating system. It will also, the PXE boot will tell it what vCenter 00:15:00.000 --> 00:15:06.000 server is going to be using. And then the vCenter server can tell that system, here is the profile 00:15:06.000 --> 00:15:10.640 we want you to use, meaning here's how we want to use your adapters, here's your IP addresses, 00:15:10.640 --> 00:15:16.320 here's all this information that will be customizing that particular image. So you don't 00:15:16.320 --> 00:15:23.440 have to go and click next, next, next, or anything like that. And if we do, again, swap out a blade, 00:15:23.440 --> 00:15:30.400 for example, we can tell it to point to the auto-deploy image, pull it all over, boot up, 00:15:30.400 --> 00:15:35.919 it has its name, it has IP addresses, passwords, all that kind of stuff, all configured to the 00:15:35.919 --> 00:15:42.479 auto-deploy push. So interactive, again, booting to an ISO, whether it be on a USB drive or a 00:15:42.479 --> 00:15:48.719 DRAC or an iLO, for a small number of hosts. A scripted installation is going to be, you could 00:15:48.719 --> 00:15:55.039 boot to an image, and then you're going to interrupt the boot process, point it to a kickstart 00:15:55.039 --> 00:16:00.320 file, which might be, like, on a FTP server or something, and it will get its answer file and 00:16:00.320 --> 00:16:05.440 start the deployment. You can walk away. Auto-deploy is going to use DHCP, it's going to 00:16:05.440 --> 00:16:11.280 use vCenter, and it's going to get the configuration for that host every time it boots, okay? 00:16:16.080 --> 00:16:22.880 So, again, interactive, if you have five or fewer hosts you're booting, you could do a CD-DVD. 00:16:22.880 --> 00:16:27.760 That's really going to be rare nowadays. Very few systems even have CD or DVD drives. 00:16:27.760 --> 00:16:33.919 The ISO is probably going to be on a USB drive, all right? You could do a PXE boot over the 00:16:33.919 --> 00:16:39.359 network and then install it, you know, get the image pushed to you that way also. That's not 00:16:39.359 --> 00:16:44.400 auto-deploy, right? This particular PXE boot is going to PXE boot and then have a system basically 00:16:44.400 --> 00:16:49.520 push the ISO files over that will go through an actual installation, and you're going to answer 00:16:49.520 --> 00:16:54.559 the questions, you know, yes, I agree, and, you know, I don't have a keyboard and de-configure, 00:16:55.119 --> 00:16:59.200 here's the disk I want to install to, some things like that, right, all pushed over the network. 00:17:03.359 --> 00:17:07.599 So, once you start the installation, it's going to start a wizard. It goes through some basic 00:17:07.599 --> 00:17:12.079 processes. It asks you, you know, what disk do you want to install to. If you have SSDs, 00:17:12.079 --> 00:17:18.959 it'll show you the SSDs. If you have a fiber channel card, for example, an HBA, and it has 00:17:19.040 --> 00:17:26.160 access to LUNs, you might see the LUNs on your SAM that the HBA is allowed to have to see, 00:17:26.160 --> 00:17:31.439 that it's zoned for. The downside of that could be you might have VMs on there, and you might 00:17:31.439 --> 00:17:35.199 pick the wrong one. So, make sure you're really careful when you're doing your installation 00:17:35.199 --> 00:17:42.800 that you are not using drives on your HBA if you're not intending to do a boot from SAM. 00:17:42.800 --> 00:17:47.359 If you're trying to install locally using, you know, an ISO file, make sure you're choosing a 00:17:47.359 --> 00:17:51.680 local disk. You don't want to overwrite a VMFS data store, wipe it out, 00:17:51.680 --> 00:17:55.760 lose all your virtual machines, okay? So, just be careful of that. Be aware of that. 00:17:57.760 --> 00:18:01.599 So, the installation wizard is going to ask you to choose your keyboard type, 00:18:01.599 --> 00:18:06.880 enter in your root password, start the installation, and it reboots. Really simple. 00:18:06.880 --> 00:18:11.599 There's not a ton of steps, right? Keyboard, password, you know, what disk you want to 00:18:11.599 --> 00:18:15.839 install to is going to ask you that, then it starts the installation, and then it reboots. 00:18:15.839 --> 00:18:20.239 And then when it comes back up again, it will boot up. Hopefully, you have selected 00:18:20.239 --> 00:18:24.880 the device that you've installed to as your boot device in your BIOS, and when it comes up, 00:18:24.880 --> 00:18:30.640 you'll actually then be able to, from the console, log into the box and configure things like IP 00:18:30.640 --> 00:18:36.319 addresses and stuff like that, okay? If you have a VMFS data store already on there, 00:18:36.319 --> 00:18:40.160 you can tell it to leave the VMFS data store alone, not to do anything to it, 00:18:40.800 --> 00:18:45.839 and, you know, to preserve the data, and just do an installation, or you can tell 00:18:45.839 --> 00:18:49.520 it you want to wipe the VMFS data store and you want to start all over again, okay? 00:18:52.400 --> 00:18:59.760 So, a scripted installation can be very similar to, you know, a traditional booting to ISO and 00:18:59.760 --> 00:19:05.199 going through it manually, except as soon as you start the boot process, you're going to interrupt 00:19:05.199 --> 00:19:11.439 it, and then you're going to give it a location for a kickstart file or for an answer file for 00:19:11.439 --> 00:19:16.079 the installation. So, all the different things that you would configure, you know, by – through 00:19:16.079 --> 00:19:21.119 the wizard by hand will be in that kickstart file. And you can even add some things in there like IP 00:19:21.119 --> 00:19:25.040 addresses and, you know, additional information that you may not have done during the installation 00:19:25.040 --> 00:19:32.319 can be done through the kickstart file, okay? So, here's kind of an example of a kickstart file. 00:19:32.319 --> 00:19:37.199 So, it shows you – there is an example of where you can find a kickstart file on the host under 00:19:37.760 --> 00:19:44.560 xe-vmware-weasel-ks.config, right, on the host. So, you can go in there and you can find it. 00:19:44.560 --> 00:19:51.920 You can store this kickstart file on an FTP server, HTTP, HTTPS, NFS. I think FTP is one of 00:19:51.920 --> 00:19:57.280 the more common ways that people store them, but it can be anywhere. You can also put it onto a USB 00:19:57.280 --> 00:20:03.040 drive and plug it into the host. That means that you're kind of visiting boxes more. You're not 00:20:03.040 --> 00:20:08.560 probably doing this as remotely like through a DRAC or something like that. So, that probably 00:20:08.560 --> 00:20:14.079 is less common. More common would be remotely accessing the host through a DRAC, mounting the 00:20:14.079 --> 00:20:20.000 ISO, and then pointing it to a kickstart file like on an FTP server or something like that, right? 00:20:20.560 --> 00:20:24.239 So, in your kickstart file will be a bunch of different settings. For example, you have to 00:20:24.239 --> 00:20:28.800 accept the end user license agreement. You're going to give it a root password. You can specify 00:20:28.800 --> 00:20:34.000 there's additional drivers you need to pull over and install. For example, maybe for a 00:20:35.359 --> 00:20:40.239 RAID controller or something like that. Or, you know, if you have a special keyboard, 00:20:40.239 --> 00:20:43.920 that's not very common, but you might have special keyboards you need to configure or something like 00:20:43.920 --> 00:20:51.359 that. This kind of shows you. So, when it boots up, when it first starts the installation, 00:20:51.359 --> 00:20:56.719 you're going to quickly interrupt that process. You can hit shift O. Then you're going to give 00:20:56.719 --> 00:21:00.880 it the location of your kickstart file. You can say kickstart is located on an NFS server. 00:21:01.680 --> 00:21:07.359 Here is the IP address of that and the folder, the name of the file. And then you can probably 00:21:07.359 --> 00:21:12.959 want to assign or going to need to assign that particular host a temporary IP address network 00:21:12.959 --> 00:21:17.280 mask to get on the network with, right? So, this is where you can give it all that information. 00:21:17.280 --> 00:21:21.599 Here's the kickstart file. Here's the IP I want you to use. Here's the mask you're going to use 00:21:21.599 --> 00:21:23.599 and get it started. All right. 00:21:27.839 --> 00:21:32.800 Auto deploy, as we've mentioned, auto deploy is a way of just quickly pushing out a config 00:21:33.359 --> 00:21:39.280 or actually, you know, an operating system and a config. It's going to do a pixie boot and get, 00:21:39.280 --> 00:21:43.520 you know, connect to a pixie server to get the operating system and vCenter, 00:21:44.479 --> 00:21:48.560 your vSphere environment is going to give its configurations and give it its host name, 00:21:48.560 --> 00:21:54.160 its IP address, its port groups for networking. You know, if there's multiple VM kernel ports, 00:21:54.160 --> 00:22:02.079 all that kind of stuff can be pushed out through that profile for that host through the auto deploy. 00:22:05.359 --> 00:22:08.959 So, here's just kind of showing, you know, some of the basic steps, right? So, you're going to 00:22:08.959 --> 00:22:14.880 connect to the home screen in the vCenter, which is your web client, you know, GUI that you're 00:22:14.880 --> 00:22:21.040 going to connect to. You're going to select auto deploy. It's been around since 6.5. So, 00:22:21.040 --> 00:22:26.239 the vCenter is going to go in and load the ESXi images that it has for that machine. So, what you 00:22:26.239 --> 00:22:32.719 might do is configure a machine first, like traditionally, use that to create that first 00:22:32.719 --> 00:22:38.000 auto deploy image. Then you can go and you can customize the image for each host and assign it 00:22:38.000 --> 00:22:45.599 to different hosts as they boot up, okay? So, basically, it's taking an image you created first 00:22:46.239 --> 00:22:51.680 and just customizing that for each host that you want to connect to after that, right? And 00:22:52.719 --> 00:22:57.599 that could be useful, very common, like I said, in an environment where you have blades. 00:22:57.599 --> 00:23:01.119 It also works with regular rack mount servers. I'm not trying to say it's only for blades, 00:23:01.119 --> 00:23:06.400 but I think in my experience, I've seen it a lot in blade environments where we know that all these 00:23:06.400 --> 00:23:10.479 blades are exactly the same and I want to be able to swap out blades and upgrade blades easily. 00:23:10.479 --> 00:23:14.880 With rack mount servers, it's more likely that you have internal storage you're going to use 00:23:14.880 --> 00:23:19.439 and you're going to push out configs. You might script those installations, but you're going to, 00:23:19.439 --> 00:23:25.040 you know, probably push them out to host and store them on local drives. Now that we have gone over 00:23:25.040 --> 00:23:30.000 some different ways you can install or deploy ESXi, let's go ahead and go to our demo environment 00:23:30.000 --> 00:23:35.760 and we'll go over how to install ESXi 8, all right? So, here's our demo environment. In this demo 00:23:35.760 --> 00:23:40.880 environment, we have one physical host, which is a pretty large host, and on it we have created 00:23:41.680 --> 00:23:49.199 three what we call nested ESXi 8 machines. We have a vCenter server and we have a 00:23:50.160 --> 00:23:54.880 virtual science NAS device that we'll use for shared storage. What we're going to do now is just 00:23:54.880 --> 00:23:58.959 create another virtual machine just for this demo. We're not going to keep it, so we can get rid of 00:23:58.959 --> 00:24:05.119 it when we're done, that we're going to use to deploy ESXi 8 on. So, I'm going to create a new 00:24:05.119 --> 00:24:13.520 VM, say create a new virtual machine. We're going to give it a name. I'm going to go ahead and call 00:24:13.520 --> 00:24:23.839 this test deploy. We'll make it compatible with a guest OS. We're going to say other and for the 00:24:23.839 --> 00:24:33.040 version we're going to say it is ESXi 8 or later, all right? And they're just saying here it's not 00:24:33.040 --> 00:24:37.920 supported in production. This is a lab, a demo environment. So, for your lab, it's fine, but 00:24:37.920 --> 00:24:43.040 obviously you're not going to do this in a production environment. All right, we're going to install it 00:24:43.040 --> 00:24:53.839 onto this drive. Here's where we can customize our hardware for our CPU, right? So, we're fine with 00:24:54.319 --> 00:25:03.599 having, you know, one core per socket. We've got two sockets. We don't have to enable hot add. 00:25:03.599 --> 00:25:06.319 We're not going to be hot adding that kind of stuff like that. We're not going to set any 00:25:06.319 --> 00:25:12.880 reservations or limits, but we do want to, because we are doing a nested ESXi environment, we want to 00:25:12.880 --> 00:25:18.079 expose the hardware-assisted virtualization. This will be important in order to get this OS to 00:25:18.079 --> 00:25:24.560 install successfully. Now, technically with this, because I'm checking this box, I can have my 00:25:24.560 --> 00:25:32.239 physical ESXi host. I can create this virtual ESXi host and then create VMs inside of that, all right? 00:25:32.239 --> 00:25:36.880 So, this box here is important to select when you're doing your lab environment, 00:25:36.880 --> 00:25:42.959 recreating a demo or create a lab environment. For your RAM, we're going to do simple 8 gigs of RAM. 00:25:43.439 --> 00:25:50.000 Hard disk drive, 40 gigs will be fine. We could, you know, set up to more if you wanted to have 00:25:50.000 --> 00:25:53.760 additional space for logs and things like that. We're going to go ahead and accept all these 00:25:53.760 --> 00:25:58.560 default settings. The only thing I need to do is connect to my ISO. So, I'm going to go to my data 00:25:58.560 --> 00:26:09.599 store here and VMware images. And here is my VMware actual hypervisor. This is the vCenter, 00:26:09.599 --> 00:26:15.280 if I wanted to create a vCenter server, this is to create my ESXi host. I'm going to select that. 00:26:18.319 --> 00:26:25.119 Say next, I can review the options I've selected. And I'm going to say finish. 00:26:28.560 --> 00:26:30.239 And it's going through creating my VM. 00:26:33.280 --> 00:26:37.520 And it has successfully created my virtual machine. So, I'm going to go ahead and click 00:26:37.520 --> 00:26:47.119 on my test deploy here because I want to start that up. And I want to go to console. 00:26:48.400 --> 00:26:50.640 And here we go. Perfect. 00:26:55.599 --> 00:26:59.359 So, here is what I've gone through. I hit enter to start the installation. 00:26:59.359 --> 00:27:04.880 It's copying over files from the ISO. That's the need to load the installer. 00:27:07.839 --> 00:27:09.359 This usually goes relatively quickly. 00:27:15.040 --> 00:27:20.319 Now, it's actually, again, it's loading up the installer for ESXi. 00:27:29.359 --> 00:27:33.199 In just a moment, it will come to the wizard. It will ask us a couple of questions about 00:27:33.280 --> 00:27:39.119 installing, what options for installing ESXi. It will ask us to configure our root passwords 00:27:39.119 --> 00:27:44.959 and things like that. You can see it's loading the VMware tools for this virtual machine here. 00:27:47.599 --> 00:27:52.560 All right. So, now it's loaded the installation wizard. And basically, it's just showing us this 00:27:52.560 --> 00:27:58.479 is the installation installer for version 8.0.2. And we just go ahead and hit enter if we want to 00:27:58.479 --> 00:28:04.239 continue. So, I'll hit enter. Now, we need to accept the license agreement. And to accept the 00:28:04.239 --> 00:28:10.079 license agreement, we're going to hit F11. If we don't want to accept it and not install ESXi, 00:28:10.079 --> 00:28:14.160 we can hit escape and it will take us out of the installation wizard. I'll hit F11 to accept. 00:28:15.359 --> 00:28:18.880 Now, it's going through looking for the devices that are on here. Basically, it wants to know 00:28:18.880 --> 00:28:22.800 where can we install. It found that hard disk drive, that virtual disk we created that was 00:28:22.800 --> 00:28:27.359 40 gigabytes when we created the VM. I'm going to go ahead and hit enter to choose that. 00:28:28.479 --> 00:28:35.119 We'll go and accept the default US keyboard. Now, a root password. Let's go ahead and type 00:28:35.119 --> 00:28:42.079 in my root password here. So, here it's just telling us that the CPUs on this host are not 00:28:42.079 --> 00:28:46.719 technically supported by 8. All the features of 8 will be supported on the CPUs on this host. 00:28:46.719 --> 00:28:50.560 But we can go ahead and continue anyway. So, I'm just going to hit enter to continue. 00:28:52.880 --> 00:28:57.439 And are you sure you want to force installation? Yes, it's forced installation. Hit enter again. 00:28:59.439 --> 00:29:01.439 And hit F11 to install. 00:29:05.680 --> 00:29:08.160 Then go through the installation process. This will take a few minutes. 00:29:08.959 --> 00:29:12.000 We went through the installation. The installation is completed. Now, it's going to ask you to 00:29:12.000 --> 00:29:15.760 remove the media and we're going to go ahead and reboot the server. So, I'm just going to 00:29:15.760 --> 00:29:24.239 go ahead and hit enter to reboot. And now we're loading ESXi. 00:29:35.680 --> 00:29:39.920 I'm going to go ahead and change it open into a tab just because that way it can usually get 00:29:40.479 --> 00:29:45.119 easier to see the whole screen. Now we see everything. We see the progress bar at the 00:29:45.119 --> 00:29:54.959 bottom. All right. So, now here we can say we want to go in and customize the system, 00:29:54.959 --> 00:29:59.280 look at the system logs, right, things like review logs, or we can do F12 to shut down. 00:29:59.280 --> 00:30:04.560 I'm going to go ahead and say go to F2 so we can customize this installation. By customized, 00:30:04.560 --> 00:30:09.920 what we're mainly talking about is going in and, you know, assigning the IP address and stuff. 00:30:10.319 --> 00:30:11.359 Password. 00:30:17.359 --> 00:30:20.560 So, here, if you wanted to go in there and change the password, we could go in here and say we want 00:30:20.560 --> 00:30:24.959 to change that password. I'm not going to. I'm going to leave that alone. So, I hit escape. 00:30:26.560 --> 00:30:31.760 I can go and configure the management network. So, if I had multiple adapters, I could go in 00:30:31.760 --> 00:30:36.160 there and, you know, view the adapters I have on here and choose which one I wanted to be 00:30:36.160 --> 00:30:40.959 the adapter for my first VM kernel port. But we have that already selected. We're good there. 00:30:40.959 --> 00:30:47.439 So, I'll say okay. If we were using a VLAN for our management network, which in a production 00:30:47.439 --> 00:30:52.160 environment, most of the time you will have a management network that you'll have your ESXi 00:30:52.160 --> 00:30:57.199 host, you know, management VM kernel port on, and you'd want to go in here and set the VLAN ID for 00:30:57.199 --> 00:31:05.199 that network. And we can set an IPv4 address. Now, here, you'll see I already have an address. 00:31:05.199 --> 00:31:09.920 You'll see I already have an address on there because DHCP gave me an address. I could also 00:31:10.479 --> 00:31:18.079 say I want to set that address statically and go in there and set all these options on there. 00:31:18.079 --> 00:31:24.000 All right. So, for the sake of this right now, normally in production, I absolutely would go in 00:31:24.000 --> 00:31:29.439 there and say set it static and statically assign an IP address. Just for this quick little demo, 00:31:29.439 --> 00:31:36.479 I'm going to go ahead and leave it at that dynamic DHCP address. I'm just going to go 00:31:36.479 --> 00:31:49.199 ahead and make a quick note of the IP we got so I don't forget it. It is 10.23.81.58. All right. 00:31:49.199 --> 00:31:54.800 So, now I won't forget that. I have a note. I'm going to go ahead and I would go normally, 00:31:54.800 --> 00:31:59.920 I would say set it statically. I would make those changes. I could enter for okay, 00:31:59.920 --> 00:32:05.839 but I'm going to leave it at DHCP and say enter for okay there. I could go in there and set my DNS 00:32:05.839 --> 00:32:10.400 servers. If I set my IPv4 address statically, I'd probably go in there and do my DNS settings 00:32:10.400 --> 00:32:17.119 statically. Again, what's my primary DNS? What's my secondary DNS? Whatever name I want to assign to 00:32:17.119 --> 00:32:24.400 it. And if I want to do a custom DNS suffix like, you know, company.com or something like that. 00:32:24.959 --> 00:32:29.839 I'm going to hit escape here. Then once I've gone in and I have selected my adapter, 00:32:29.839 --> 00:32:34.560 I configured the VLAN I want that adapter to be working, that VM kernel port to work on. 00:32:35.760 --> 00:32:40.880 I set my IP address, my DNS, all that kind of stuff. I can go in there and say I want to test 00:32:40.880 --> 00:32:48.719 my management network and just say, can we ping our gateway? Can we ping our DNS server? That 00:32:48.719 --> 00:32:50.880 name resolution, that's going to fail. It's not going to be able to resolve. 00:32:52.479 --> 00:32:58.239 Oh, it worked there. Must be registered somewhere already. I didn't realize that was. 00:32:58.800 --> 00:33:04.880 If you completely jack up the configuration of your host, either here or through, you know, 00:33:04.880 --> 00:33:09.839 the web interface or in vCenter, and this host becomes unreachable and you need to kind of start 00:33:09.839 --> 00:33:15.680 all over again, you can go to network restore options and you can tell it just to restore it 00:33:15.680 --> 00:33:20.800 back to the default, the way it was when you first installed it, and it'll go back to DHCP 00:33:20.800 --> 00:33:24.719 and all that and you can start over again. You can also tell it to restart your management 00:33:24.719 --> 00:33:28.800 network. If for some reason you think some settings aren't working properly or you just 00:33:28.800 --> 00:33:32.400 need to restart without rebooting the whole entire host, just the management network, 00:33:32.400 --> 00:33:40.160 you can have that option there. But basically, we've got that configured, so now we can see 00:33:40.160 --> 00:33:54.959 if we can connect to the host and I have the connection here and I can log into it. 00:33:54.959 --> 00:33:58.880 I'll log in as root and that password I configured. 00:34:02.160 --> 00:34:06.719 All right. Here's my first time connecting to a ESXi host that I just installed fresh. 00:34:07.119 --> 00:34:09.840 We can say if you want to join the customer experience to help, you know, improvement 00:34:09.840 --> 00:34:15.280 program. I don't really have any storage configured other than my local disk that was on here, 00:34:15.280 --> 00:34:20.800 right? So, I don't have any data stores, you know, from the, you know, storage array or something 00:34:20.800 --> 00:34:26.399 like that. I don't have virtual machines. My networking is very basic. I have the default 00:34:26.399 --> 00:34:31.120 VM network that I get my, you know, by installing the host. I have my management network just for 00:34:32.080 --> 00:34:38.159 that first VM kernel port. But this is what a generic default installation looks like, 00:34:38.159 --> 00:34:42.000 all right? Again, this is just for the demo for you to see what an installation looks like. We're 00:34:42.000 --> 00:34:45.439 going to delete this. We have other hosts we'll be doing the rest of our demos with. 00:34:45.439 --> 00:34:52.479 But now you know how to create a nested VM, how to install ESXi on it, how to configure 00:34:52.479 --> 00:34:57.120 the network settings for ESXi, and then how to access it for management, for further management.