Continuing the saga of building out my VMware home lab I will be covering the process off installing ESXi 5.5 as a Virtual machine in my environment. As stated in my previous posts, I am a VMUG Advantage Member so I do have access to newer versions of VMware software.
That might make you wonder why I am going with ESXi 5.5, well you are going to have to wait and see what my plan is for that.
Lets get started with the installation of ESXi 5.5
Once the ESXi .ISO has been booted up on the machine you will be presented with this screen.
Press Enter to boot, or let the countdown continue and it will boot automatically.
The ESXi installer will load into memory. It may take some time for this to complete depending on how much Memory you have on your machine, so your mileage may vary.
After all of this you will be presented with the ESXi 5.5 Welcome Screen. Press Enter to continue.
Press F11 to Accept the End User License Agreement to continue on.
Once you press F11 the install will start scanning the System it is installing on to see what Storage is available.
On the next screen you will be presented with a list of Datastores that are available to you to install ESXi on. Select the Datastore that you want to use and press Enter.
You will then be asked to select your Keyboard layout. Press Enter to continue.
Now you will have to set the Root Password for the OS. Once you confirm the password press Enter to continue.
The ESXi Installer will then can your system again .
You will then be asked to Confirm your decision to install ESXi on the datastore you selected. Press F11 to continue.
Now the installation will begin, again your mileage may vary as to how long it will take to complete.
Once the installation has been completed you can press Enter to reboot the machine to complete in installation.
After the reboot has been completed and the system boots up you will be presented with the following screen.
This concludes the ESXi install guide. I hope you found this helpful an please check back for more updates to come.