Steps to Install VMware vSphere ESXi 6.7MustBeGeek

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VMware vSphere ESXi is one of the most popular hypervisor. It is used by most companies to manage their virtualization infrastructures. VMware vSphere version 6.7 lately released by VMware includes many more improvements like Configuration Maximums, Bug Fixes, ESXi Quick Boot, Persistent Memory(PMem) for the best performance and stability of the ESXi hypervisor. The version 6.7 Update 2 with build number 13006603 is the newest version available at the moment. In this article you will find steps to install VMware vSphere ESXi 6.7. Before you begin the install, make sure that the physical server meets the minimum hardware requirements supported by ESXi 6.7 Update 2. Then download the ESXi ISO image from the VMware official website.

Steps to Install VMware vSphere ESXi 6.7

The steps to install VMware vSphere ESXi 6.7 are same as previous versions of ESXi. If you are using HP, DELL or Cisco UCS Blade servers, mount the ISO image into the virtual media with connecting to the ILO, iDRAC or UCSM KVM Console. Else burn the ISO image onto a CD/DVD and make sure to configure the server to boot from CD/DVD placing the CD/DVD into the drive.

When you power on the server, the server will boot using ESXi installer as shown above. Two boot options are, boot from the ESXi installer “ESXi-6.7.0-20190402001-standard Installer“ or “Boot from local disk“. Leave the default selection “ESXi-6.7.0-20190402001-standard Installer“ and press Enter key on your keyboard to start the installer or wait 10 seconds to boot automatically.

Now wait for the installer to extract installation files. This will take few minutes.

Wait for another few minutes for the installer files to be loaded.

Once the ESXi installer is loaded, you will get the welcome message as shown above. Press Enter key on your keyboard to continue the installation.

Press F11 Key on your keyboard to accept the VMware End User License Agreement (EULA) and continue.

Installation will scan the server hardware for available devices and this would take a few minutes. If you encounter any issues double check the VMware hardware compatibility matrix or assist the server vendor support.

Available local or remote storage devices will be shown to select. If you have SAN devices configured and connected in a fabric those will be shown as remote devices. In my case I will be selecting the local disk to install ESXi hypervisor with pressing Enter key on the keyboard to continue.

Select a keyboard layout as shown above and press Enter key on your keyboard to continue.

Type a password for ESXi root user. Please note the password must be at least 7 characters long and must not contain common sequences. Press Enter key on your keyboard to continue.

Press F11 key on your keyboard to confirm the install of ESXi 6.7 Update 2 hypervisor.

VMware ESXi 6.7 installation will continue for a couple of minutes.

Once installation is successfully completed, press Enter key on your keyboard to reboot the server.

The server will initialize and boot the VMware ESXi 6.7 Update 2 hypervisor into the Direct Console User Interface(DCUI). If you have DHCP configured in the environment, it will take an IP from DHCP server. Otherwise, press F2 key on your keyboard to configure IP address, Hostname, DNS and other settings. In this example, the ESXi host is receiving IP 192.168.1.22 from DHCP server as shown above.

To access the hypervisor console, open Internet Browser and type the URL http://IP_Address_of_the_ESXi and press Enter key on your keyboard to open the page. Accept the SSL certificate warning. This will open the vSphere Host Client. Type the username as root, type password then click Login button.

Please note that the vSphere Client for Windows (C# client) is no longer available since ESXi version 6.5 and the only way is to access ESXi Server server is through the web browser using vSphere Host Client. vSphere Host Client is HTML5 based management portal and is available in ESXi 6.7. When you install ESXi server 6.7 vSphere Host Client is embedded in the ESXi server itself and you don’t have to install any application on your machine to access management portal of ESXi server.

After logging in successfully, vSphere Host Client user interface will open and you can now start creating virtual machines and virtual networks on this host.