Deploying v. Sphere ESXi 6. Jan 2. 01. 7 by Jason Fenech. Sphere. I had previously covered how to deploy ESXi 6. How to install ESXi 6. To be honest, very little has changed since then, at least not in terms of deploying this latest ESXi 6. VMware. So for today, I will limit myself to outlining the deployment procedure making reference to the points listed in Figure 1, something I put together for this post as a quick ESXi deployment reference of sorts. Ill finish off this post with a video that takes you through the process of installing ESXi. The video shows how to deploy ESXi to a VM which incidentally reminded me to share the latest features related to nested ESXi. As per William Lams article these include Paravirtual SCSI Support, Guest. OS customization, pre v. Sphere 6. 5 enabling on v. Sphere 6. 0 U2 and NVMe support. Pxe Install Vmware Esxi 5' title='Pxe Install Vmware Esxi 5' />ESXi and vCenter Server 5. Documentation VMware vSphere ESXi and vCenter Server 5. Documentation vSphere Installation and Setup Updated Information. Figure 1 ESXi 6. Requirements. The requirements are exactly the same as those for ESXi 6. So as mentioned, nothing has changed on that front. Hardware. The minimum amount of RAM required is 4. GB with 8. GB being the recommended minimum. Briefing question 35147 Which vSphere feature automatically optimizes resource utilization and responds to workloadrequirementsA. Storage IO ControlB. A minimum of 2 CPU cores from any AMD or Intel 6. September 2. 00. 6. Note that the actual hardware requirements are of course primarily dependent on the number and type of VMs the ESXi host will be running. BIOS Settings. From a BIOS perspective, the Intel VT x and AMD RVI virtualization hardware extensions must be enabled, as always, to let you run 6. VMs. You must also enable the NXXD bit, short for No Execute AMD and e. Xecute Disable Intel. This enforces a security feature that prohibits the execution of code in specific areas of memory. This enacts an extra layer of defence against malicious code and buffer overlflows. Storage. A minimum of 1. GB for the boot device and 4. After a hard work, Finally prepared a Post with 101 free tools which are absolutely free. This tools helps VMware administrators to manage the virtual environment. Wrap Up. I know this has been another large blog post but I hope it covers all of the questions that might come up about ESXi and Secure Boot in 6. GB for the scratch partition is required. If booting from a local disk, SAN or i. SCSI LUN, 5. 2. GB is the minimum required for the VMFS volume and scratch partition. The choice of hard drives really depends on whether or not local datastores are used, use of v. SAN and so on. In general servers come with SCSISATA drives. Also note that SAS drives while supported will be treated as remote storage. You should also reserve a minimum of 2. Matlab Software Full Version For Windows 8 here. MB for logging based on a log rotation quota of 1. Network. On the network side of things, make sure that the servers comes equipped with Gigabit nics. Gbps is recommended when running features such as FT and v. SAN. The following list of open network ports is also required. Compatibility. As always use the VMware Compatibility Guide to double check that your hardware supports ESXi 6. You can also use the CPU Identification Utility to verify 6. VMware support. Just download the tool and mount it as a drive and boot off of it as shown in Figure 2. Also make sure that the server is running the correct data and time. Figure 2 Using the VMware CPU ID Utility to verify ESXi hardware compatibility. Installation Methods. The installation methods remain pretty much identical as well. Use the manual method when you have a single or perhaps a handful of ESXi hosts to install. A path to a configuration kickstart script can be specified at the boot options screen to automatically supply the information required by the ESXi installer as opposed to typing it in. If you have a substantial number of hosts 5, the auto deploy method is probably the preferred method seeing how it fully automates deployment while ensuring that newly commissioned ESXi servers will strictly conform to any applied standards. The PXE boot method is another deployment method where DHCP TFTP are used to offload and install an ESXi image on servers equipped with PXE enabled network cards. A kickstart script can similarly be used to fully automate the process. One final option necessitates of an FCo. E Fiber Channel over Ethernet LUN. Using VMware software FCo. E adapters in conjunction with network adapters with FCo. E offloading, ESXi may be installed and booted up off an FCo. E LUN. Figure 3 Auto Deploy architecture diagram Source VMwareInstallation Procedure. Typically, youll first install ESXi manually before moving on to more complex deployment methods. These latter methods are generally used in enterprise environments more than anywhere else due to the size and complexity of the infrastructure used. The procedure that follows outlines an interactive ESXi installation on a bare metal server. By interactive I mean one where the details asked for by the installer are entered manually by the user as the installation progresses. The steps are as follows Download the ESXi Installer ISO Image VMware VMvisor Installer 6. Burn the ISO image to a bootable CDDVD or create a bootable USB stick using Rufus. Figure 4 Using Rufus to create a bootable USB stick. Create the DNS A and PTR records for the ESXi servers. Insert the bootable medium and power on the server. Enter the BIOS setup and enable both the virtualization hardware extensions and NXXD bit. Set the device boot option to USB or CDDVD. Figure 5 Enabling virtualization settings on an Intel server. Liar Liar Soundtrack Cris Cab Tour. Save the changes made and exit the BIOS setup. The server should restart and boot off the bootable medium created. Figure 6 Landing screen for the ESXi 6. Press Enter to start. Press F1. 1 to accept the EULA and continue. Press Enter to install ESXi on the selected disk. Select a keyboard layout and press Enter. Type in the root password and press Enter. Press F1. 1 to commence installation. Alternatively, press F9 to revisit previous settings or Esc to exit. Remove the bootable medium and press Enter to reboot the server. After the server reboots, press F2 and log in as root. Select Configure Network Management followed by IPv. Configuration. From the IPv. Configuration screen, enable the Set static IPv. IPv. 4 address, subnet mask and default gateway. Driver Modbus Linux. Press Enter. Select DNS Configuration and enter the IP addresses for the primary and secondary DNS servers and specify the FQDN for the ESXi host. Press Enter. Press Esc followed by Y to confirm the changes effected and restart the management network. Optionally, you can enable ESXi Shell andor SSH from the Troubleshooting Mode Options menu. Figure 7 Enabling Shell and SSH access on ESXi 6. At this point you should be able to access the newly provisioned ESXi host via SSH or the VMware Host Client. Figure 8 Connecting to an ESXi 6. SSHFigure 9 Connecting to an ESXi 6. VMware Host Client. And to conclude, heres a video outlining the installation process and basic setup. Thats all there is to installing ESXi 6. I hope you found this post useful and as always feel free to drop me a line in the comments box down below.