Home Lab - vSphere and vCenter Installation and Configuration Guide
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 29 янв 2025
- This video demonstrates how to install vSphere and vCenter for home lab purposes. With vSphere being one of the most prominent enterprise hypervisors, this video is designed to aid knowledge seekers so they can quickly deploy vSphere and potentially vCenter. Inside, you will find the installation steps as well as configuration for the following items:
General hypervisor installation
Portgroups and VLAN assignment
IDS Port Mirroring
VMkernel tuning
Virtual Switch security
Logic for creating multiple virtual switches with physical adapters
Central management with vCenter
Cluster configuration with DRS and HA
00:20 - Intro
02:04 - Step 1 - Download ISOs
03:13 - Step 2 - Make Install USB
06:26 - Step 3 - Install vSphere
11:08 - Step 4 - Configure vSphere
26:19 - Step 5 - Install vCenter
34:33 - Step 6 - Configure Cluster
even tho 3 years old it is still the best english vmware setup introduction guide on youtube 👍thanks
Thanks, Justin. I really enjoyed your SEC530 labs and have been following your H&A videos ever since. I've been wanting to setup vCenter and vSphere on a home lab for a while now and this video helped push me to go ahead and do it. I appreciate the walkthrough!
That's fantastic. I'm glad this helped you move forward
Thank you for this walkthrough and the "side steps" explanations, like what is a portgroup, how works the virtual switch in esxi and stuff like that. Clear structured and comprehensible instruction. A video like this is very rare. Helpful for my apprentice to understand how esxi works in general and how the esxi networking works. He installed the vCenter by himself. It works and he learned a lot. Thanks!
Great. Best video on youtube related to the vSphere and vCenter Installation and Configuration! THANKS
Rockstar... the best video on VMware intro guide on vSphere and vCenter
The video was very informative and interesting, best ever video I have seen so far....Thanks so much.😊 Keep up the spirit.
Thanks, Chris for making this video. Happy homelab!!!
You're weclome. FYI - My name is Justin Henderson. I don't always mention it in the videos as I try to focus on getting content out there for everyone
@@TellaroCyberResilience So sorry. Good to know that Justin :-)
@@nafis195 No worries at all. :-)
Best home Lab Vcenter guide i've seen hands down. Great job.
Thank you very much. We try to hear them towards bringing you value
That was a really walkthrough Home Lab, This really helped me set up my own VCP home Lab and practice. Thank you!
The best video on setting up vSphere. Thanks!
Oh, that's my fault that I needed to add Vshere.Local in two places, but I only did only one. After I corrected, it worked very well! Again, a great video and thanks!
Glad you got it figured out
Thanks a million, your video spared me a lot of stress.
Glad it helped
Great walkthrough as a homelab user that has no formal training on vmware this was super helpful, I had already done most of the install but the way you did it was slightly different and made more sense. Now I can finally migrate VM's from my old HP G6 to my new(er) HP G9! Thanks!
Thank you for the excellent explanation, I'm really looking forward to your videos about the distributed switch
what a great video. Thank you so much for providing informative videos that are
interesting and easy to understand! New subscriber!
Best instructional video I've seen in a long time, thanks man!
Fantastic! I'm glad you liked it
Very good knowledgeable video! Really appreciate for very excellent VMware networking. understanding
Awesome videos. I would love to see how you deploy Security Onion inside your IDS network. Thanks again
The deployment changes from client to client. Maybe that would be a good topic for a future video
Incredible 👏👏👏 learned a lot
Thank you
Great video! Hope to see the other hypervisor videos soon!
More to come!
You have been a blessing to my knowledge and understanding on virtual machine. Thank you very much. I am waiting for the follow up to this wonderful session.
Thank you for your kind words
Very helpful video for starters. Thanks a lot from Berlin!
You're very welcome
@7:27 - why did you not install esxi on the 32GB SD card ???
I appreciate your efforts in making things easy to understand. looking forward to more interesting videos.
Thank you
Thank you so much for the complete setup process.
Thanks for the great Video! your video helped me a lot, I'm really looking for the next part of the video about connecting Active Directory and DvSwitch to the environment!.
Thank you so much , your explanations are incredible, Keep the great work!
Just subscribed :D
Coming soon!
Thank you very much for showing the whole setup process. It was very helpful for me 😀
Justin, I recieved the red arrows of pain. I have been trying to fix it without luck. what can I do to fix it?
Just here to say - Thank you Justin. This is awesome!!! Hope to work on some of these with you.
Any time!
but i have a question, when installing Vcenter in my own computer, it always appeared "a problem occured durung RPM installation: time out" as soon as it achieved 96% in progress. Could you tell me how to fix it?
Thanks Justin for this video. Very PRACTICAL.
You bet!
Any more videos on vCenter ?
Thanks for everthing. Subscribed to follow you!
Grate Video Sir...I learned a lot...
You're welcome
Can you change the ip addreaa at the top in vCenter to a name instead ??
This is awsome please continue from this
What book would you recommend to learn VMware vSphere, ESXi ?? Ty
Thanks Justin, God Bless, superbly made simple the entire configuration process
question: i have running for long time vmware esxi 6.7 pre installed in DELL EMC , which i wish to put it into a vmware center to control it and, i've just recently buyed another poweredge640 dell EMC whic also has vmware esxi7.0 . Can i create or download a vcenter to control both vmwares? thsnks thoug
@12:04 - did you setup storage or is esxi installer that create that storage ???.
when i install esxi 7.0.3 on the 64GB SD card, no local datastore is create.
@23:50 - you should setup one server fully, then rinse and repeat 🔂 for the others,, because it makes a better faster video.
great video. Very straightforward.
How can you complete the setup if you do not have another system with a browser. What I mean by that is if you just have raw hardware and the ESXI is all that has been installed. How do you then get to run the VCSA on the ESXI system directly?
As you as yet have no other workstation available to access it.
Hi Loved your video , but i followed your steps and i didn't succeeded , deployment stuck in 99% , or error like "The installer is unable to connect to the vCenter Appliance Management Interface..." . Do you have a solution for that ?
Great video, dumb question, do I install center on a VM on one of the host on on my local machine?
That's actually a good question that a lot of folks think but don't ask. So thank you for the opportunity to clarify. The easiest method is typically to run the vcenter installer on your local machine but have it install vCenter as a VM on top of your vsphere hypervisor. You could install it elsewhere but for a home lab I'd recommend installing it to vsphere
Thanks for the video... HAHA I had my stuff all messed up, no wonder everyone had screens I didn't have! This was very helpful... I actually deleted my entire install and reinstalled along with this video to get everything going as it should.
I'm glad it helped
Hello, in step 1 it shows the following error. "Failed to send file [vmeare%20vCenter%20server-0.vmdk] to the host [192.168.80.135], please check the network connection. installer log files are located at c:\users\user\appdata\local\temp\vcsauilnstaller. Can you help me.
Great walkthrough =) thanks =)
Awesome video!
Thanks. It is extremely beneficial
This was SO incredibly helpful!! The only problem I ran into (which is a MAJOR one), is my password doesn't work after installing vCenter, so I think I'm pretty much dead in the water? I even created another admin account and tried to log in that way to no avail. I've tried with and without the domain name. Annndddd... scratch that - after rebooting the machine, vCenter doesn't load up at all. Darn it!! Update... didn't realize I had to start the VM to access it. Oh well, it's only my first few days with VMWare. Thanks again for this video!!
@25:23 - that is what I like o do too. Only have one Active Domain Controller, and i like it to run on the esxi host.
so my setup, don't have local esxi datastore or local AD, it jus have my router and the 4-esxi servers. Then after installing vCenter & vSAN at the same time, I will then setup all the needed VM in esxi (DC-01, DC-02, RootCA, Issuing-CA, FileServer, PrintServer, etc...)
I have older blades. To get vSphere 7 on it I edit the boot options and add AllowLegacyCPU. The downside, if your vSphere computer goes down and you reboot, you need to manually edit the boot options on each restart.
That's no fun. I've not had to do this but thank you for sharing how to make this work
Some great tutorials here so great work, I was wondering if you could point me in the direction of any Video you have that shows the end to end deployment of ESXi 7.0 vCenter and then SRM 8.4 (I am good for installing ESXi & vCenter but am hazy with what is required in order to get a LAB up and running with SRM 8.4 as id like to do some testing. Any help very gratefully received
I'd love to help on this one but SRM isn't on our road map for upcoming videos. We've got a laundry list of things I need to record and get posted. I just wanted to respond
Thanks Justin, please I have question, Iam trying to deploy the vcenter 7.0 on EXCI 7.0. only have one localhost which is ESXI. my vcenter work smothily till step 5 select deployment size, it failed with error saying that "a problem occurred while reading the OVA file Error: invalid XML" the problem i guess with network and connection somehow not reading the OVA properly.
What error is any shows up in vsphere?
I'm assuming I can't turn on all the services on the default TCP/IP stack such as vMotion and Fault tolerance logging as I'm using the free version
That is correct. The free version does not include the use of those features. If you are wanting that functionality in a free hypervisor, you might check out proxmox
hi can i have esxi7 for dell poweredge emc?
hi, your lab is so awesome
Tried to install ESXi, but the installation fails because it cannot find a network card. The network card is built into the motherboard.
Great tutorial!
I built 3 EXSi 7.0 servers and used 3 web browsers connect to and sign on as root account. I was configuring TCP/IP as per your introduction exactly, but when I hit save button, I received the error MSG mentioning "Please provide a valid domain name, the length must be less than or equal to 62". Do I need to define vsphere.local domain first and where/how I definite?
Just saw your other post
Thank you, waiting for tomorrow finding the evil in tls traffic zoom meeting.
That one will be a good discussion
So I checked out the license and its only for a year that I get access to enterprise level license. If I'm paying 200 a year does the license get renewed?
Are you referring to VMware license? If so it's an annual license. The three year subscription is not much more than the one year so I typically recommend that essentials deal
This was a fantastic video it really got me going in the right direction. Any chance on seeing that vSAN video?
Thank you. Unfortunately, vSAN is likely on the back burner for awhile as most of my videos will be security centric concepts
Thanks for the Walkthrough on vsphere. I am in the process of setting this up. I may can get my hands on a HP Z820. To start my lab. Will that be enough to get started with Lab?
Late response but yes!
you are the best!!!
i really learned a lot... thank u
Is it possible to do a separate VCENTER on a windows machine instead of an existing ESXi host? Specifically with v7
I believe the recommendation at this point (if not the requirement) is to deploy vcenter as a virtual appliance on top of vsphere.
Thanks a lot. Are we able to create templates on esxi too (without Vsphere/cluster) ? I don’t have installed yet because I’m waiting the server delivery 🚚
Unfortunately not. That requires vcenter
Great video thanks 😊
Thank you
Phenomenal! Information thank you!!
You are very welcome
I am having an i9 machine with 64 GB ram and SSD as well still my vcnter works too slow. Now able to work anything in LAB . Any suggestion to make it faster
That's really surprising. I've had slower cpus that were still snappy. First thing I'd check is your power settings. They may be affecting your speed by trying to lower power consumption. Also, run benchmark software to validate your machine is operating at expected performance
What's the link from restarting to configuring the hosts. Are those hosts done thru Windows?
I get it. You have to manage it from another PC on the network?
Yes. You are correct
@28:58 - is it possible for you to show me/us(RUclips), using your current config of 3 esxi and your router to setup vCenter using the last option on that page: "Install on a new vSAN Cluster containing the target hosts"
One question, where do you install Vcenter? in a single computer or in another dedicated server? this is confusing for me.. can you please clarify this?
You can install vcenter on a dedicated server or even as a virtual appliance on top of one of your hypervisors. A lot of companies install it as a virtual appliance. It works fine. However, if there is ever an issue with one of the hypervisors that vcenter is running on, it can cause cascading failures. One can argue that VMware HA heartbeats should catch a hypervisor issue and fail it over to another hypervisor, but I've experienced multiple issues that HA would not trigger a failure that left virtual vCenter servers in an offline state.
The cascading failure is typically due to vcenter needing to authorize ports on a distributed vSwitch or other cloud services. I'm not stating deploy a virtual vcenter on hypervisors is bad. I'm just stating if you do you should consider high availability aspects. There are multiple ways to work around this. Example: The vCenter VM should use a NIC assigned to a virtual switch that uses ephemeral ports so that vcenter has network traffic. Otherwise, vcenter will not come up as a distributed switch requires vcenter to authorize it's own NIC which cannot happen.
@@TellaroCyberResilience Thanks a lot for your response. so it is valid to say that it is better or the best practice is to install Vcenter in separated server, correct? if so, can we install it in a dedicated desktop with win 10?
Thanks, Justin. If I have only 1 host box, do I still want to install and set up vCenter? Or, set up a lab environment using vSphere/ESXi?
A single host vSphere so makes sense but probably not vCenter. That is unless you want to play with multiple virtual vSphere instances with vCenter for learning. I, personally, would just do a single host
@@TellaroCyberResilience okay, that's what I currently have.
As for vlans, if I want to experiment with different products (pfSense, Splunk, Suricta, Security Onion, Kali, Metasploitable, Domain Controller, etc), how would you set that up? Do you, or will you, cover that?
@@ordahackney7131 Yes. We will. Also, on a single host you can implement vlans without doing so at the switch level
@@TellaroCyberResilience So, I should not turn on vlans in the ESXi interface? Where you set yours to 300?
@@ordahackney7131 You would not at a vlan on your host. I'll do a live stream later where we can go through vlans, routing, and more to show how you could place your vms and route Grigg things like pfSense and have multiple subnets
Gracias es un video muy completo y con excelente información, TKS!! great job!
Thank you
I don’t understand, do I install this like I Install an operating system? I’m trying to use an old PC.
You are correct. vSphere would run as your operating system.
I enjoy, thank you
Excellent thanks
How to backup VM?
3rd party?
Vmdk?
Is the HP Z620 noisy?
Thank you very much!
can we install it on Mac Mini M1 or Macbook M1?
I do not believe the M1 processors will support this.
Nice video 😊
Thank you
Thank You so much
Decent effort. Thanks for trying,
Thank you
Thank you.
Superb
Great job Justin
Please could you share a VMware online practice lab Thanks. I need to dirty my hands
Thank you, Bro!
You're very welcome
Like it a lot to learn VMWare
It's definitely helpful
thanks so much
Great to start with Vsphere ,Esxi 7
Great walkthrough Justin, thanks a lot.
Quick question cause I think I might be confused. So I got my R740 with one CPU (will get the second as I go) and will be deploying ESXi on it, the question is, in order to deploy vCenter for HA on my homelab, how many ESXi hosts do I need? (I believe the answer is 2, right?), does that mean that I will need at least 2 physical CPUs to be able to deploy my vCenter? (Which will manage 2 ESXi hosts, each installed on one physical CPU?).
Thanks in advance.
Great video! You laugh like Curly from the 3 Stooges.
Hi,
I would like to know how to setup esxi + vcenter with vsan as it's been install using IPv6 only
I have a laptop & 4-node system, each node has:
- 128GB RAM, dual 1GB RJ45, dual 10GB RJ45, a 64GB SD, 2x 256GB SataSSD, 4x 1TB SataSSD
a 24-port 1GB switch & a 24-port 10GB switch
1. I install esxi 6.7 onto the SD card in each node
- disable IPv4 for each node
- enable IPv6 with ULA {fd10:xxxx:xxxx::/64}
- edit /etc/hosts to list all nodes + vcenter ipv6 address info
2. at this point no datastore is enable or created, but ~50GB of free space is on the SD card
3. in storage->devices, i clear partition on each SSD
4. I created certificates for each node and replace /etc/vmware/ssl/rui.{crt,key} files
5. at this point all seems to be working fine, not sure about log files, will look into using USB-16GB to store them on or use the extra ~50GB on the SD card
6. I only connected one of the 1GB-RJ45 ports, but while installing selected both for management IPv6 vswitch, I connected the 10GB-RJ45 but did not set an address nor created a vswitch
7. I then started the GUI install of vCenter 6.7 Appliance and I told it to create vSAN with the 2x 256GB as cache & 4x 1TB as capacity, it reach 99% of step 1 of 2, and have not move since
with message "setting post config parameters"
tinypic.host/i/Ni2ub
8. I see the appliance created and running on esxi-01, if i access vcenter ipv6 address port 5480, i see
Getting Started page of vCenter 6.7 with embedded PSC
Question:
1. This should work fine, what did i do wrong ????
esxi IPv6 only network not possible on esxi 6.x
thanks
thank you so
You're welcome
Great
Cluster name 'grape'
I think you went a little overboard on your bragging about your vlan setup but over all it was still a very nice video.
I hope I didn't come across as bragging in the video. I apologize if I did. I want to be humble in all of these videos
@@TellaroCyberResilience It's ok, just off in the weeds a bit. Would go well in a video specifically about vserver networking.