With the general availability (GA) release of vSphere 6.5 I decided to upgrade my home lab and learning environment to the latest and greatest of VMware’s product. Not only for learning, but for running the systems I use daily in my lab.
Preparation work:
- Download and Install ESXi 6.5 to my new lab hardware – Configure ESXi 6.5
- Download the VCSA 6.5 Installation media and start the install process – See below
I mounted the installation media (ISO) on my Windows notebook and started the installation by navigating to \vcsa-ui-installer\win32\ and starting the installer.exe application.
This will display the Center Server Appliance 6.5 Installer. Seeing how this install will be a new installation of vCenter I selected “Install”
Here you find a two step installation process. The first step will deploy a vCenter Server 6,5 appliance and the second step will be configuring this deployed appliance.
Accept the standard End User License Agreement (EULA) to move forward into the installation.
Next you select the type of installation you need for your environment needs. In my case I have chosen the embedded Platform Services Controller deployment.
Next, choose the ESXi host where you would like to have this vCenter appliance deployed and provide the root credentials of the host for authentication.
Then, provide a name for the vCenter appliance VM that is going to be deployed and set the root password for the appliance.
Based upon your environment size, select the sizing of the vCenter appliance. I went with Tiny as it fits the needs of my Lab environment. Note: It will configure the Virtual Appliance with 10GB of ram so be sure you can support this in yours.
Next, select the datastore where the vCenter appliance files need to reside.
Configure the networking of vCenter appliance. Please have a valid IP which can be resolved both forward / reverse prior to this to prevent any failures during installation.
Review and finish the deployment, and the progress for stage 1 begins. Upon completion, Continue to proceed to configure the appliance. This is stage 2.
The stage 2 wizard begins at this point. The first section is to configure Network Time Protocol (NTP) setting for the appliance and enable Shell access for the same.
Next configure an SSO domain name, the SSO password and the Site name for the appliance. Once the configuration wizard is completed you can login to the web client.
The following short video I made gives you an feel for the install process. Enjoy.
[youtube id=”lUzO-jHXsm4″ width=”600″ height=”350″]