Installing VMWare vSphere ESXi 6.7

The steps to install VMware vSphere ESXi 6.7 are pretty straightforward and if you’ve ever installed any kind of OS from scratch you shouldn’t have any problems with ESXi. First things first, burn/write the ISO image onto a bootable USB stick and make sure to configure the server to boot from USB making sure you’ve plugged the USB stick in…

When you power on the server it will boot using the 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. (be mindful that your version number may differ from above)

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

Wait for another few minutes for the installer files to be loaded, not long enough for a cup of tea though…

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.

The installer will scan the server hardware for available devices and this should only take a few moments.

Available local or remote storage devices will be shown for you to select from. Your screen will look different to above but it should be obvious which drive you should be installing to. If you have SAN devices configured and connected they will be shown as remote devices. In this case I will be selecting the local disk to install ESXi to by pressing Enter key on the keyboard to continue.

Select a keyboard layout that matches what you have attached and press Enter 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. It will let you know if your chosen password does not match the requirements, once you’ve got one press Enter key on your keyboard to continue.

Press F11 on your keyboard to confirm you are happy with the disk being repartitioned and to continue with the install.

The installation will continue and only takes a few minutes to complete.

See, told you it wouldn’t take long.

Press Enter to reboot your server, remembering to remove the installation USB stick when the machine physically restarts.

The server will initialize and boot the VMware ESXi 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 the F2 key on your keyboard to configure the IP address, Hostname, DNS and other settings. In this example, the ESXi host is receiving the IP address 192.168.1.22 from a DHCP server.

To access the hypervisor console, open a 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 and password then click the Login button.

It’s worth noting that the only way to access ESXi Server server is through a web browser using vSphere Host Client. vSphere Host Client is an HTML5 based management portal and is available in ESXi 6.7. When you install ESXi server 6.7 the vSphere Host Client is embedded in the ESXi server itself and you don’t have to install any applications.

After logging in successfully the vSphere Host Client user interface will be displayed in your browser and you can now start creating virtual machines and virtual networks on this host.