Installing VMware ESXi

- [Instructor] In this video, let's take a look at how to install VMware's ESXi hypervisor. And an ESXi hypervisor is a bare metal or a type one hypervisor, meaning that we install it on the server itself rather than on top of some underlying operating system. For example, on my Mac, I have VMware Fusion, and that runs on top of macOS and then I can install virtual machines on top of that. But we're going to install ESXi, which runs on the machine itself. And you may be able to install this for free if you have some spare server hardware lying around or what I did, I went out to Amazon and I bought a used server. It was rack mountable, about a couple of them. Now I wouldn't recommend buying the particular model that I bought because my model no longer supports the current version of VMware, but we're going to get going by taking a look at how to get a free licensed version. This is not some 60 day evaluation, this is a fully licensed version of VMware ESXi. We're going to use the term ESXi interchangeably with vSphere. The vSphere hypervisor, that is VMware's ESXi. And to decide what version we want to install, let's check out the VMware hardware compatibility guide, and you can put in your information about your particular server. Let's make this just a bit larger so it's easy to see. Now, what I have, just as an example, is I have an HP. It's a ProLiant DL380 Gen7. So I'll say DL380, and let's see what we have here. We've got a DL380 Gen10, Gen9, and you see down here is the ProLiant DL380 Gen7. And it says the highest version of hypervisor I can install is 6.0. However, I've tried it with 6.7 and I know it works. The bottom line is I don't want you to go out and buy server hardware if you don't think that you're going to be able to install the ESXi hypervisor on that hardware. Now for mine, I could go with version 6.0 and that would probably work. I happen to know we'll work with 6.7, but you might be looking for something that runs 7.0, that's the current version at the time of this recording. So once you identify what version you need to install, let's take a look at how we do that. Let me put some links up on the screen for you. I made some Bitly links, some shortcut links. If you need to go back to version 5, which I hope you don't because in version 6 they started having a much nicer gooey interface, makes it a lot easier to manage in my opinion. But if you need to go back to version 5, you can go to Bitly, bit.ly/free-ESXi5. If you want to install version six, then you can go to bit.ly/free-ESXi6, or you guessed it. If you'd need to install version seven, it's bit.ly/free-ESXi7. Now let's say that we did want install ESXi7. That's where I went in this previous tab. And if you've already got a VMware account, you can log in with those credentials, or if you don't, you can create an account. And once you create an account on this page, there's going to be an option to register this software. And you fill out some information about yourself and your company and your contact information, and you get a fully licensed version. I say, fully licensed. It's somewhat limited in that, it's not going to give you access to their support system at VMware. You're sort of on your own, but hey, it's free and it's licensed, It's not going to expire. So I am good with that. Let me get logged in and show you what this looks like. If you've not yet completed the registration, there's going to be a button here to register. But I've already done that, so you can see that I've got a license. And for my download packages, I want to download this ESXi ISO image. So I would say Manually Download, and I would download that ISO file. Then we could put that ISO file on a bootable DVD or bootable USB drive and boot our machine up on that. Now, the way that happens is going to vary widely depending on what your server hardware is and what kind of machine you're using to make that bootable media. Are you using Microsoft windows? Are you using macOS? That's going to vary, depending on how you're creating this bootable media. So I'm going to let you research that one on your own, and you create a bootable DVD using an ISO image or how do you create a bootable flash drive using an ISO image for your particular operating system. Now, personally, I use macOS. Let me take you out to a terminal window and I'll show you the command I'll tap to and create a bootable DVD. Again, your mileage is going to vary. I want you to research how to create bootable media, either a DVD or a USB flash drive for your particular operating system. But here's how I created a bootable DVD on macOS Big Sur. I'm in the terminal app in macOS and I want to go into the Downloads directory where I downloaded this and I'll say, CD Downloads to get there. And I'm going to insert a blank DVD into a DVD external drive that I have that can burn a DVD. We'll insert that and it's going to pop up with a message, asking me what I want to do with this blank DVD. Here you see that message. And I'm going to say, I want to ignore that, and I'm going to use this command. It's the Hdiutil command. And again, I'm doing this on a macOS Big Sur, and you see the name of the ISO file that I've downloaded from VMware. Let's press Enter. It says it's preparing data for the burn. And it's going to take a few moments to complete this burn, and I'm going to fast forward through this in the video so you don't have to wait for the entire process. But when finished, I'm going to have a bootable DVD that I can put into my server. And when I insert that in my server, I need to have that server configured to boot first off of my DVD or off of the flash drive, if that's what you're using. I should boot off of that media before I boot off of my internal hard drive. This is going to, again, vary widely depending on your particular server hardware. You might need to press a particular function key as the server is booting up to indicate what you want to boot from, or you may need to go into the setup utility and say, you want to set the boot order, where you're preferring to boot off of the removable media before you boot off of your hard drive. So we'll go ahead and finish up this burning of the DVD, and we'll get ready to install. The DVD is now finished. I'm ready to insert the DVD into my server and boot from the DVD. Let's take a look at what that boot sequence looks like, by the way, in order to get a good screen cap of this to show you the ESXi installation. This is not actually on that ProLiant server I was telling you about. I'm actually doing this install of 7.0 ESXi. I'm doing this inside of VMware Fusion on my Mac. So this is not the system we're actually going to be using to install our Cisco Unified Communications of servers. Instead, am using this virtualized environment to show you what it looks like to install ESXi. So the IP address that we're going to be setting up here, it's going to be a little bit different when I set it up on my actual HP ProLiant server, but this is what it looks like. Again, it's going to take a bit of time to go through the installation process, so I'm going to be fast forwarding through this. Here VMware is telling us that we might want to check out that compatibility guy that we already took a look at, to make sure that our platform is going to be supported. Let's go ahead and press Enter, and I'll accept the ULA, and we'll install it on the hard drive that we have available. And I'll say, I'll use US default as the keyboard layout, and let's give a password. We'll press Enter again, and we're ready to install. And I'll fast forward this portion and we'll check back after the installation is complete. The installation has completed and we'll press Enter to reboot. Our server has rebooted, and we see that it's automatically obtained an IP address via DHCP. We'll probably want to go in and do an F2 and customize that, and hard-code it for our environment, but this is the installation I did on top of VMware Fusion. This is not the one we'll actually going to be using but I wanted to show you what the interface looks like. So we're going to go to 192.168.196.3. In fact, I've already done that, and it's giving me a warning that the connection is not private. We don't have a trusted Sign Certificate, so I'm going to go under Show Details, and I'm using Chrome here. I'll say, yeah, I want to visit this website anyway. And in another window, I'm being prompted to enter my administrative credentials for my Mac to make sure that I really want to get permission to go to that untrusted website. And I do, let's make this a bit larger, and let's get logged in. Now we're looking at the screen for ESXi. Now this is version 7, and this was going to work basically the same as version 6 for our purposes. We're going to be installing multiple virtual machines in this course. We'll install a couple of Cisco Unified Communication Manager servers, for example, a publisher and a subscriber. We'll install a Cisco Unity Connection server, and we're going to even install a virtualized router, a Cisco CSR 1000V. And for comparison sake, we're now looking at our configuration screen for ESXi Version 6.7. This is running on that HP ProLiant server I was telling you about. This is that physical server where we're going to be installing our virtual machines that we're going to use throughout this course. And you'll notice that this interface looks practically identical to the 7.0 interface. One thing we want to fix though is that we are currently in evaluation mode, and this license is going to expire in 60 days. Well, let's fix that. Remember when we did our registration of our ESXi software, we were given a valid license key. I'm going to go under Manage and notice right now it says we're in evaluation mode. So let's say we want to assign a license, and I'm going to paste in that license from that webpage, and I'll say, Check the License. It says it's valid, and I'm now going to assign it. We'll say Assign License, and now I have a fully licensed VMware ESXi Version 6.7 server. And the first thing we're going to install on this server is a virtualized router as we start to build out the topology we're going to use in this course. We're going to do that in our next video. Specifically, we're going to be configuring a Cisco CSR 1000V. CSR, that's the Cloud Services Router. I'll see you back in just a moment for that installation.