In this longer post, we’ll get started with ESXi, how to install it and login. ESXi is meant to run as the OS, and to be very minimal so there’s as much resources as possible available for the guest OS’s. Even the install is very spartan! Lucky for us, however, it is fairly straight forward to install.
Once you boot from the ISO, you’ll be greeted with the welcome screen. Not much to note here.
Agree to the EULA and move ahead…
Select the disk to install the main OS on. Do keep in mind that this will format your disk, so any existing content will be wiped out! Additional drives can be provisioned post-install, in the management site.
Select your preferred keyboard layout here.
Choose your admin password.
These are two interesting errors I got, but you’re not likely to see them. I was installing ESXi in a VirtualBox VM (so I could capture the screenshots), and I forgot to provision the proper amount of CPUs. So here, ESXi is telling me that it needs at least 2 CPU cores, or no install! It was a simple fix (just go back to the VM options and add more CPUs); but VMWare doesn’t expose hardware virtualization, so I got the second error regardless. You can still setup ESXi without hardware virtualization, however, as seen below.
Ok, this is it! Final confirmation
And now you’re done. Congrats!
The next time you reboot your box, this is what you’ll see:
There is some very minimal configuration you’ll be able to do from the console itself. To do everything else, you’ll need to navigate to the URL displayed in this screen (your IP will likely be different from mine). Login with the admin credentials you created earlier.
In our next episode, we’ll go over the basics of this UI and how to setup guests and all that fun stuff.