From the course: VMware vSphere 8 Certified Technical Associate - Data Center Virtualization (VCTA-DCV) (1V0-21.20) Cert Prep

Demo: Create a VM in vSphere 8 - vSphere Tutorial

From the course: VMware vSphere 8 Certified Technical Associate - Data Center Virtualization (VCTA-DCV) (1V0-21.20) Cert Prep

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Demo: Create a VM in vSphere 8

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- [Rick] In this video, I'll demonstrate how to create a new virtual machine. 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 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 RickServer 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 data stores that are accessible to that ESXi host. So I'm going to choose this local data store here, and click Next. So I'm actually just going to click back for a moment here, and this virtual machine is going to run on this ESXi host. But if I click Next, I'll see the data store. This is the underlying storage for this virtual machine. So the VMX file, the VMDK file, all the files that make up this virtual machine will be stored on this local data store. And so now I'll click on Next. And now I have to choose the compatibility level for this virtual machine. And you can see here I have a few different options, but by default it will be set to the latest version of ESXi. And let's assume that in my environment, I am running all the hosts on the latest version of ESXi, then this is the option I should choose. But if I have some older hosts, particularly if I have older hosts that are part of clusters where there's a virtual machine may potentially run, then I need to choose an older version of virtual hardware. And the way you want to think of it is this. If I choose the latest version of virtual hardware, this virtual machine will not be able to run on any host that is older than that compatibility level specified here. It can always run on newer hosts, but it cannot run on older hosts. So essentially I want to pick, hey, what is the oldest host that this virtual machine might potentially run on, and choose that as compatibility mode for this VM. Now, in this case, all of my hosts are the latest version of ESXi. And because of that, I'm going to choose the latest version of virtual hardware. And so now I'll go ahead and click Next. And I have to choose the guest operating system. And in my case, I'm going to choose Microsoft Windows Server 2016, because that's the operating system that I plan to install. And essentially what I'm doing here is I'm telling the virtual machine, hey, this is the operating system that will eventually run on this hardware, and I'm building virtual hardware, right? I'm going to have things like virtual CPUs and virtual memory and all other sorts of virtual hardware that this operating system is going to run on top of. And so I have to make sure that the virtual hardware is ideal for the operating system. And think about it this way. Let's say that I wanted to install the latest version of Windows server, and I go into my closet, and I grab this really old physical server, and I try to install the latest version of Windows on that. Well, it's probably not going to work. You've got to have the right hardware that matches up with the operating system. And so that's what we are essentially doing here, is we're building out the virtual hardware to run the operating system that we are specifying. And so now I'll click Next. And on this screen, I'm going to choose, how many CPUs do I want this virtual machine to get? I'll start with two virtual CPUs, and I'm also going to grant it four gigs of virtual memory. And you can see here the size of the virtual disc is 20 gigs. Well, if I make that virtual disc bigger, and right here, you can see the maximum size. So for example, let's say that I configure this virtual disc to be 90 gigs and thick provisioned. Well, you'll see it'll turn red here. This data store doesn't have enough space for me to create a 90 gig virtual disc. So I'm going to bump it down. I'm going to make this a 20 gig virtual disc. And the other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to configure this virtual disc as thin provisioned. The benefit of thin provisioned is that it consumes less space. So for example, let's say that in this particular VM, I only have 10 gigabytes of actual data, right? I'm creating a 20 gigabyte disc, but there's actually only going to be 10 gigabytes of data truly stored within this virtual disc. Well, in that case, we will only consume 10 gigs of space on the underlying physical data store. So because it's thin provisioned, it's only taking up the space that it truly needs. Now, if I were to change this to thick provisioned eager zeroed, then it is just going to consume a full 20 gigabytes on the underlying physical data store. It doesn't matter how much actual data is inside of this virtual disc. It's thick provisioned, therefore, it's going to consume all of that space immediately. And so with thick provisioned, there are certain benefits, especially with thick provisioned eager zeroed. If I choose a thick provisioned eager zeroed disc, I might be doing something like creating a virtual disc for a Microsoft SQL server, something that is going to need really good performance as it writes new data. If I have a scenario like that, then a thick provisioned eager zeroed disc might be a good option for me. But in my case, the real priority is to save space on my data store. So I'm going to choose a thin provisioned virtual disc. Under Networking, I'm going to create a virtual NIC for this virtual machine, and I'm going to choose which port group I want to connect it to. In this case, I'm going to go with exactly what the defaults are here, the VM network. And then finally, this is an important one. I have to configure the CD-DVD drive, and by default, this will be configured for client device. But what I want to do is I want to boot up this virtual machine from my Windows installation media. And I have stored my Windows installation media on a data store. So I'm going to pick data store ISO file here, and I'm going to browse to the data store. for the first time, it is going is all installed and this virtual machine is ready to go

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