How To Install Esxi 7

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Thisdeployment guide assumes you are building an environment as a proof of concept and is not meant to be a production deployment. As a result, choices made are intended to speed up and ease the process. See the corresponding guides for each technology, and make choices appropriate for your needs before building your production environment.

ESXi offers flexibility versus local hard drive install to install from and onto an SD card or USB memory stick. Please see vSphere documentation regarding best practices for logs when booting from USB or similar.

For more information, see the VMware knowledgebase article Installing ESXi on a supported USB flash drive or SD flash card (2004784). Booting ESXi from a USB drive is useful if the host has an existing ESXi Version 6.X or an earlier installation that needs to be retained.

Download UNetbootin from The Windows version of the application does not include an installer; however, the OSX version is packaged in a .DMG file that you must mount. You must also copy the application to the Applications folder before launching. Alternatively, you can use YUMI, which allows booting multiple installation images on one USB device, plus the option to load the entire installation into RAM. The download link is -multiboot-usb-creator/.

A countdown timer displays when you first boot ESXi. You can wait for the countdown to expire or press [ENTER] to proceed with booting. A series of notifications displays during boot, which can take several minutes to complete.The VMware ESXi screen displays when the boot completes.

Select the Network Adapters window and press [ENTER]. Use the arrow keys to select the adapter to use as the default management network and press [ENTER]. More than one management network can be selected for redundancy.

Navigate to and select the DNS Configuration window. Add the primary and (if available) secondary DNS server address(es) in the respective fields. Set the host name for this ESXi host in the Hostname field.

Hi all,

I have a HP DL360 Gen9 that I am trying to install ESXi on. Previously this server was running Windows.

I've tried both the standard version of ESXi and the HPE specific version, whenever I mount the ISO via iLO and attempt to boot from it, all seems fine at first, but after a few minutes of the ESXI installation screen I get a screenful of changing red error messages. They reference LOTS of things and it seems to change often, but some of the messages are "X64 Exception Type 08 - Invalid Opcode Exception", "CALL ImageBase ImageName+Offset" but as I say the messages are lengthy and change.

I did Google the error but the only thing I found was to try to disable the SD Card in the BIOS, I've done that but it made no difference. I've also installed the latest SPP on the server, and I've also tried deleting the storage arrays and re-creating them, but no difference.

I'm really not sure whats wrong so any help would be great!

Thanks

Martin

Hi

It turned out to be a bit of a weird one! I had accessed iLO via Chrome and the HTML5 console option. No matter what I did, I would get the errors I mentioned below.

I switched over to using Internet Explorer with the more classic iLO console and it worked fine! I can only assume there is something slightly buggy about the HTML5 console, with it being new(ish).

Thanks

Also if I do choose to install esxi on local disks should I just install it on my raid 10 disks ( 8 x 300 gb ) or should it be on a mirror which in that case I would loose 2 drives and then we are back to the usb discussion !

I know ESXi can boot from SAN, USB, local Disk, etc. Currently I have 3 hosts that use local Raid10 disks for both booting from and as datastore locations (along with iSCSI SAN access to larger LUNs for larger storage). I recall someone at a VM...

We use them for upgrades between tested versions, just pop in an upgrade flash drive and change the bios to boot off the new memory device. Or when we send out upgrades to remote sites, we load the cloned usb devices with ESXi, preconfigure them, and then drop them in the US Post. At the remote sites the techs just install them in the servers and boot. Once booted ESXi runs out of memory, it does use the boot device for some logs and configurations.

As for even if your running off local drives, it makes upgrdaes and installs much easier. If you want to try the new version you can clone your USB drive, and then install it to a new one. Spares are massively cheaper/easier to keep around (I always duct tape one to the rack).

In what documentation does VMware state that you should be using a flash drive over regular drives? (I am not questioning the validity of this but would like to see the document myself) I have taken the VMware Courses and I do not recall this being discussed in any of them.

The only disadvantage I can think of with using a USB is that the drive sticks out from the front or back (normally). I have found one motherboard that has a USB port on the board itself, allowing the drive to sit internal to the chassis. I might try seeing if I can get an SD card to work as boot media, and install the ESXi hypervisor on it.

ESXi installation option With the installable version of ESXi there is the option to install on local disk or on flash memory like USB stick or SD card (quite the same case of the embedded version). The option is fully supported:...

The question comes up because I keep seeing people stating it is a best practice but no one seems to be able to point to the documentation that states this. It also comes up because if I am going to run this on a production server I need to be able to be confident that it will work reliably.

VMware is referring to fault tolerance. With a RAID solution if a drive fails, the host keeps running without any disruption of service (theoretically). If a USB drive fails, you would have to replace the drive and reboot the host.

If you need to run virtual machines on a physical server, you need to install hypervisor software first. When it comes to VMware vSphere, a building block for the virtual infrastructure is ESXi. VMware ESXi is a bare metal hypervisor that makes virtualization of the physical hardware possible in a VMware vSphere ecosystem.

Read this blog post to learn about interactive VMware ESXi server installation basics. We will take a look at how to install ESXi 6.0 interactively, including considerations for physical hardware, hardware compatibility, and media creation.

One of the easiest and quickest ways to install ESXi is from a USB disk. To quickly create a bootable USB disk, you can use a utility called Rufus (there are other tools available that you can use). This utility allows you to locate an ISO image and creating a bootable USB disk from this image. Once you run the executable:

After you reboot the server, the ESXi server installation process onto your physical hardware is completed. In the next part of the series, we take a look at the initial ESXi configuration from the Direct Console User Interface (DCUI).

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I am currently setting up a new 3-host VSAN cluster that will be placed into production soon. (Note this is the newer "Virtual SAN" (VSAN) technology, not the older vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) technology). This is the first time I have worked with VSAN.

Each of the three hosts in the cluster has four 1TB local HDD's and one 200GB local SSD (which VSAN needs for read/write caching) to contribute to the cluster. I have installed ESXi 5.5 directly on the first local HDD of each host.

From what I have read in the VSAN documentation, disks used by VSAN must solely be used by VSAN. That is, once VSAN "takes over" a local drive, that drive can not be used for any other purposes (such as reserving partitions for use by other OS's). However, it wasn't clear to me if that also meant not being able to store the ESXi bootable partition on one of the VSAN local drives.

I've heard a lot about installing ESXi to a bootable USB stick as an option, but have never tried it since we've always just placed the ESXi boot partition on our traditional SAN. (For background, the new VSAN cluster is going to replace our blades and traditional SAN due to downsizing and cost-cutting measures).

My recommendation for your specific Supermicro configuration is to use the internal USB with an enterprise purpose-built USB card (there should be a slot on the motherboard). If not, and your hosts are using a SAS HBA or motherboard SATA ports, and you have spare drive slots, using a small single SSD is an okay alternative.

Most servers have an internal SD-card slot (or sometimes mirrored slots), or an internal USB port directly on the motherboard. You can install it on one of these. I have a bunch running off the SD card, and two that use USB stick.

If you do end up on USB instead of SD, make sure you buy a good, proper flash drive that has a nice fast write speed. I just spent my entire day copying 60GB of files onto a 64GB flash drive that could only write at 3MB/sec. It was horrific. The USB sticks that cost twice the price typically get way, way more than twice the performance.

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