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

Installing ESXi 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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Installing ESXi 8

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- [Rick] In this video, we'll learn how to install ESXi version 8, and we're going to go through a few slides here and talk about some of the prerequisites and talk about what the overall vSphere installation process looks like, just so that we're comfortable with those configuration tasks before we actually begin the demos. And so, let's say that I'm creating a brand new vSphere environment. Well, how do I start that process? I'll start by installing ESXi on at least one host, and that's what you're going to see in the first demo in this section, we're going to use the interactive installer to set up ESXi on a physical host. And once ESXi is all configured and all set up and all ready to go, then we can actually deploy the vCenter Server Appliance. vCenter is what we're going to use to manage all of our ESXi hosts, but it runs as a virtual machine. So, I need to have at least one ESXi host up and running before I can deploy the vCenter Server Appliance. So, we'll do that next, and then we'll start to organize our inventory in the vSphere client. So, eventually we'll have multiple hosts, we're going to have to license those hosts. We'll have virtual machines running on those hosts, and we'll do things like put those virtual machines into resource pools and create clusters of ESXi hosts. All of that stuff is going to be done using the vSphere client. But before we can use the vSphere client, we need vCenter. And before we can use vCenter, we need an ESXi host. So, let's take a look at some of the hardware requirements that are necessary in order to install ESXi version 8. And you can find these requirements at the link shown here on your screen. So, we're going to need at least two CPU cores, and we have to utilize a supported processor. So, we need to choose a physical processor that is actually supported by VMware. We have to enable the NX/XD bit for the CPU and bios. This is one of the things that makes virtualization possible, so we'll have to make sure that that is enabled on the physical hosts themselves. The hosts need at least 8 gigabytes of memory, and we need at least 1 gigabit or faster ethernet controller. We have to have a boot disk of at least 32 gigabytes of persistent storage. We can use hard disks, SSD, or NVMe. Booting from an SD card or from a USB device is now officially deprecated, so we're going to try to steer clear of those options. And what you'll see in our first demo is we're going to do an interactive installation of ESXi. And that is basically the process of booting a physical host from the ESXi installation media. And as the host boots from that media, we'll have a number of menu options and things that we need to set up and select. So, the interactive install is a easy way to get your first host up and running. However, if I want to install ESXi on many hosts, I might want to script out the installation of ESXi, I can do that as well or I can use Auto Deploy. And Auto Deploy is going to use PXE. So, essentially with Auto Deploy, here's how it'll work. A physical host with nothing installed will boot up. It will issue a DHCP request, it'll get an IP address, and it'll also get the location of what we call a PXE boot server. That PXE boot server is essentially going to feed that bare metal host and ESXi image that it can boot from. So, with Auto Deploy, we basically set up this underlying infrastructure where whenever we add a new host, it's going to boot up, it's going to reach out to this PXE boot server, and it's going to automatically install ESXi on those bare metal hosts. So, in smaller clusters, in newer environments, you're primarily going to be using the interactive install option that you're going to see in the next demo. But in larger environments where you're frequently adding hosts, a scripted install or Auto Deploy are both viable options to kind of speed up the process of onboarding new hosts.

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