How does vmware esxi 5.5 configure clients?

to learn vSphere, in many cases, you need multiple physical devices to build an environment. What if there is no environment? If you already have an existing ESXi host, a feasible way is to install several ESXi virtual machines on it. Many articles have written about how to install ESXi on VMware Workstation 8 or later. Today we will talk about how to install another ESXi 5.5 on the hypervisor of ESXi 5.5. Yes, it is feasible. Of course, there are some preconditions and necessary steps. First of all, when you create a virtual machine and create a virtual hardware configuration, you should pay attention to meet the minimum requirements for ESXi 5.5 installation (for example, at least 2 CPUs, if you only have 1 CPU, the installation will be rejected directly. Please refer to the official VMware manual for details.) My purpose is to test VSAN, so the configuration adopted is 4 CPUs, 8GB of memory, 2 network cards (in two different subnets) and 4GB hard disks with thick provisioning (note: 2 hard disks are needed for testing VSAN, which will be added later). The details are as follows:

image

Secondly, the choice of the operating system of the client is very interesting. You can't find the option of ESXi 5.x at first, so just choose a Other(64bit) at will. Immediately after the creation, change the virtual machine configuration, and change the operating system type in Options, General Options. At this time, you can find VMware ESXi 5.x in Other.

image

if you are using the Chinese version of the vSphere Web Client, you can find it here:

image

the next thing to note is that you must use virtual machine version 9 or 1 (for ESXi 5.1, it is v9, and for ESXi 5.5, it is v1), so you must upgrade to virtual machine version 1 here. If you create a virtual machine with the vSphere Web Client, you can directly select the virtual machine version 1. If you create it with the vSphere Client, because the vSphere Client can only create version 8 virtual machines at most, you can only create v8 virtual machines. Therefore, you still have to open the vSphere Web Client and upgrade the virtual machine version to 1. In view of this, I recommend using the vSphere Web Client directly at the stage of creating a virtual machine. In addition, there is a necessary option to open, that is, to open the function of hardware virtualization in the properties of the CPU of the virtual machine hardware-to expose hardware-assisted virtualization to the guest operating system. (The English version corresponds to "Expose hardware-assisted virtualization to the guest operating system."). Why do you need this? When the physical host installs ESXi, there is a prerequisite that the virtualization option of the processor needs to be turned on in the BIOS, right? Now the virtual machine is the same, and the processor needs to support virtualization options. This option has the same effect. Note that this function can only be set in the vSphere Web Client, but not in the traditional vSphere client, which once again proves that the vSphere Web Client should be used directly.

by the way, since vSphere 5., VMware has been guiding users to use the Web client more and more, and many new settings must be configured in the Web client. However, because there was no web client before installing vCenter, the traditional client is still a little useful. If your environment is purely virtualized, you can only deploy vCenter or vCSA on this host after installing the first ESXi host, then you still need to use the traditional client first. After the installation and configuration of vCenter Server are completed and the web client can be used, you can basically use the web client all the time.

the installation process is very simple, so I won't say much. Finally, let's take a picture of successful installation.

to sum up the key points:

use the vSphere Web client (the operation to avoid upgrading the version of the virtual machine)

change the operating system by editing the virtual machine properties twice. x

directly create a version 1 virtual machine for VMware esxi

turn on the hardware virtualization of the CPU-expose the hardware-assisted virtualization to the guest operating system.