Demo: Create a VM in vSphere 6.7 - vSphere Tutorial

- [Rick] In this video, I'll demonstrate how to create a new virtual machine in the vSphere 6.7 HTML5 client. So here you can see I've already logged in to the vSphere client and I'm going to go to hosts and clusters. And you can see I have an ESXi host that already exists here, and there is an inaccessible virtual machine. I'm just going to remove that from inventory and we're going to create a new virtual machine here. So I'm going to right click on my ESXi host and I'm going to choose new virtual machine. Now, if I had a cluster of ESXi hosts here, I could right click on that as well but I only have a single host. So I'm just going to right click that host, do new virtual machine and I'm going to create a new virtual machine from scratch. In future videos, you'll see some of these other methods but for the moment, I'm going to create a brand new virtual machine. I'm going to call it Rick Server 2016 and I'm going to choose the folder in which I want to store the virtual machine. I'll just put it in my virtual data center, click next. I'll choose the ESXi host that I want this virtual machine to run on. So I only have one host. So that's an easy decision. And here are the datastores that are accessible to that ESXi host. So I'm going to choose this LocalDatastore here and click next. This is where the virtual machine files will be stored. All right, so the virtual machine is going to run on this ESXi host. The virtual machine's underlying files, like the vmx, the vmdk, all of those files, they'll be stored in a folder here on LocalDatastore. And then I'll choose the virtual machine compatibility. So when I'm doing here is I'm choosing the version of virtual hardware. And the main factor in my decision here is what types of ESXi hosts are running in my environment? In my lab, I'm only running ESXi 6.7 and later, but let's say that this isn't a lab. Let's say that this is actually somebody's production environment and they still have some ESXi 6.5 hosts running in their environment, then I would choose this version of virtual hardware, hardware version 13. And so the different hardware versions align with different versions of ESXi. If I go to ESXi 60, that's hardware version 11. ESXi 67, that's hardware version 14. And the newer versions of virtual hardware support new features. They support more memory, more CPU, things like that. So you always want your virtual machines to be at the most current version of virtual hardware, as long as your ESXi hosts support it. So I'm going to choose ESXi 6.7 and later here, but if I had some ESXi 6.5 hosts still floating around in my data center, I would choose that version. Then I'll click next and I'll choose my guest operating system. So I'm choosing Windows Server 2016 64 bit and basically what you're doing here is you're creating your virtual machine. You're creating the hardware of your virtual machine. So what I'm telling this virtual machine is this is the operating system you want to expect. Build virtual hardware that aligns with this operating system. Just like a physical computer, you need to have the actual hardware to support your operating system. All right, you can't take a 15 year old physical server and install Server 2016 on it. Well that's very similar to these virtual machines, there's all these different operating systems, even going back to Windows NT, Windows 98, Windows 95, right? And 3.1. So there are all these different versions of operating systems that are supported and the virtual hardware is going to be different for those different operating systems. So I'm just choosing the operating system that I plan to install later on and the new virtual machine is going to be created with hardware that's compatible with that operating system. And so I'll go ahead and click next here. And now it's going to ask me to customize my hardware, so I'm going to give this virtual machine two virtual CPUs, that's usually a pretty good starting point, four gigs of memory, maybe I'll bump that up a little bit to eight but that's usually a good starting point as well, and my new hard disk, I'm going to to create a 20 gig virtual disk. You can see that it was in red because my datastore didn't have enough space to support a 40 gig disk. So I'll just bump it down to 20 gigs and I will choose a thin provisioned virtual disk. That's going to consume much less space on my datastore. With thin provisioned, the virtual machine is only going to use the space that it actually needs. All right, so if I create a 20 gig virtual disk, but there's only actually 10 gigs of data on that virtual disk, it'll only consume 10 gigs of space on the datastore. But if I were to choose a thick provisioned disk, it would immediately consume 20 gigs, regardless of how much data is on the actual virtual disk. So in this case, I'm going to go with thin provisioning. Now, I should say there are use cases where a thick provisioned eager zero disk is a better option. Like, for example, something like a SQL database that requires really high performance when it's writing new data, I would choose a thick provisioned disk for that scenario but I don't need that here. So I'm just going to go with thin provisioned and I'm going to go ahead and hit next. I'm not going to go through all of these virtual machine settings right now. I've configured the basic options. I'll also choose a network for this virtual machine to connect to. And there's one other really important thing that I need to do here. So I'm going to collapse this new hard disk and under my CD DVD drive, this is an important one. So, I am going to choose a datastore ISO file and what I want to do is find my Windows installation media. So let's take a look and I don't see it here. It's not on LocalDatastore. It's not under any of these datastores that I have already created. So I've got a bit of a problem here. Right, because I don't have the actual Windows installation media to boot my new virtual machine from. So that's something I should've done upfront. So let's cancel this for a moment and I'm going to go to my datastore and I'm going to upload that Windows installation media. Okay, so here's my datastore called LocalDatastore and I'm going to go to files. Then under LocalDatastore, you see here the files that are contained within this datastore. I'm going to click on upload files and I'm going to locate my Windows 2016 installation media, my ISO image and I'll just click open here. Now as you can see, my upload failed here. So the reason that it failed is because I'm using a self-signed certificate. So what it's telling me here is in order to get this file uploaded, go to this URL. This is the host client for this ESXi host. So I'm going to open that in a new window and it's going to bring me to the host client for ESXi 01 and I'm just going to put in my credentials, log in as root, and I'm going to browse to my datastore here, LocalDatastore, and if you're using a certificate authority signed certificate, this will not happen to you, but I'm using a self-signed certificate, so I have to use the host client, go to my LocalDatastore, go to my datastore browser, click on upload, and here's my Windows Server 2016 installation media and I'm going to upload it that way. So here you see it's at 1% and it's going to take a few minutes, so I'll pause my recording but I just wanted to demonstrate that process where we actually have to go to the host client and upload this file to that LocalDatastore and within the host client, I can see all of the datastores that this ESXi host has access to, so I can upload this file right there and kind of work around that self-signed certificate security issue. Okay, so now my upload has been completed here. I'm just going to close out of the host client and let's take a look at my new virtual machine creation wizard here. I'm going to go to the CD DVD drive. I'm going to choose a datastore ISO file and under LocalDatastore, look at that. Now we've got our Windows ISO image available. So we're in good shape now. We've got some actual Windows media to boot this new virtual machine from. So I'm going to grab that. I'll hit okay here. And then under this new CD DVD drive, I'll choose the connected power on option. So when this virtual machine boots, it's going to boot from that ISO image on this LocalDatastore. And that's essentially the same as, you know, booting up a computer from the CD drive. And I'll choose the rest of the defaults here for virtual hardware. I could also come into VM options and modify some of these as well but I'm going to just leave those as the default as well. And then I'll go ahead and click on finish. And so here you can see this new virtual machine that's in the process of being created here and if I go to recent tasks, you can see the virtual machine was created and now if I just simply right click this virtual machine, and power it on, and I'm going to open up my console here. And let's see what happens when this virtual machine boots. So here's my virtual machine booting up. I'm going to choose which boot device I want it to boot from and I'm going to select the CD drive. And there we go. Now it's launching into the Windows installation media. Now we can go ahead and install Windows on this virtual machine and get it all set up the way that we want it to be set up. So we've now manually gone though the process of creating a virtual machine, setting up all of the virtual hardware and installing the guest operating system.