Home Lab - vSphere and vCenter Installation and Configuration Guide

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

[@ErLeuchten]

even tho 3 years old it is still the best english vmware setup introduction guide on youtube 👍thanks

[@justinbaker2060]

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!

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

That's fantastic. I'm glad this helped you move forward

[@thomaspeter2316]

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!

[@hosseinsabouri3121]

Great. Best video on youtube related to the vSphere and vCenter Installation and Configuration! THANKS

[@davidnajeme8222]

Rockstar... the best video on VMware intro guide on vSphere and vCenter

[@pentonvillefandango5455]

Best home Lab Vcenter guide i've seen hands down. Great job.

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

Thank you very much. We try to hear them towards bringing you value

[@khosrowjalali7898]

That was a really walkthrough Home Lab, This really helped me set up my own VCP home Lab and practice. Thank you!

[@nafis195]

Thanks, Chris for making this video. Happy homelab!!!

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

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

[@nafis195]

@@TellaroCyberResilience So sorry. Good to know that Justin :-)

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

@@nafis195 No worries at all. :-)

[@miguellombana9847]

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!

[@alfaisalabdulkader8119]

The video was very informative and interesting, best ever video I have seen so far....Thanks so much.😊 Keep up the spirit.

[@danielsuarezuy]

The best video on setting up vSphere. Thanks!

[@davidye70]

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!

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

Glad you got it figured out

[@protechsolutions970]

Thanks a million, your video spared me a lot of stress.

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

Glad it helped

[@exit3119]

Thank you for the excellent explanation, I'm really looking forward to your videos about the distributed switch

[@ojecko]

Best instructional video I've seen in a long time, thanks man!

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

Fantastic! I'm glad you liked it

[@lkdipeolu]

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.

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

Thank you for your kind words

[@melimelon8]

what a great video. Thank you so much for providing informative videos that are interesting and easy to understand! New subscriber!

[@shebipatel9704]

I appreciate your efforts in making things easy to understand. looking forward to more interesting videos.

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

Thank you

[@NSPK-]

Very good knowledgeable video! Really appreciate for very excellent VMware networking. understanding

[@georgewilliams5410]

Thanks Justin for this video. Very PRACTICAL.

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

You bet!

[@zentralesfundbuero]

Very helpful video for starters. Thanks a lot from Berlin!

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

You're very welcome

[@hannesblack6949]

Thank you very much for showing the whole setup process. It was very helpful for me 😀

[@GopalAle]

Thank you so much for the complete setup process.

[@hasanshaikh3221]

Thanks Justin, God Bless, superbly made simple the entire configuration process

[@1BAmir]

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

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

Coming soon!

[@wes7919]

Awesome videos. I would love to see how you deploy Security Onion inside your IDS network. Thanks again

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

The deployment changes from client to client. Maybe that would be a good topic for a future video

[@HamsterAvenger0]

Great video! Hope to see the other hypervisor videos soon!

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

More to come!

[@Francois-B-Arthanas]

Just here to say - Thank you Justin. This is awesome!!! Hope to work on some of these with you.

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

Any time!

[@nicklee5324]

Thanks for everthing. Subscribed to follow you!

[@vickielum6905]

great video. Very straightforward.

[@TDHobbies]

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.

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

I'm glad it helped

[@samdarshsondhbeats]

Incredible 👏👏👏 learned a lot

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

Thank you

[@jacobgeorgechacko2250]

Grate Video Sir...I learned a lot...

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

You're welcome

[@sofi6463]

This is awsome please continue from this

[@AshBlitz]

Thanks. It is extremely beneficial

[@daryldavis111]

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!!

[@dimabashynskyi4984]

Great walkthrough =) thanks =)

[@victoralonsobetanzocorrea8065]

Gracias es un video muy completo y con excelente información, TKS!! great job!

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

Thank you

[@TheSigmaLennyShow]

Phenomenal! Information thank you!!

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

You are very welcome

[@majeedmx7016]

Thank you, waiting for tomorrow finding the evil in tls traffic zoom meeting.

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

That one will be a good discussion

[@bobkoss280]

Awesome video!

[@Liv4IT]

Great video thanks 😊

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

Thank you

[@michaelhenze877]

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.

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

That's no fun. I've not had to do this but thank you for sharing how to make this work

[@foxhypetv1811]

i really learned a lot... thank u

[@leonelsalah8950]

hi, your lab is so awesome

[@mikeschinkel]

Great tutorial!

[@fbifido2]

@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...)

[@alexandrpisukov91]

you are the best!!!

[@joedoe2672]

Decent effort. Thanks for trying,

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

Thank you

[@VenmaniKannan]

Excellent thanks

Thank you very much!

[@anwar.shamim]

I enjoy, thank you

[@MirzaArshadBeg-fu3qu]

Thank You so much

[@subhanullahasim721]

Thank you.

[@fbifido2]

@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.

[@chellosoccer]

Great video, dumb question, do I install center on a VM on one of the host on on my local machine?

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

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

[@dragonmz9514]

Like it a lot to learn VMWare

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

It's definitely helpful

[@fbifido2]

@7:27 - why did you not install esxi on the 32GB SD card ???

[@DailyMortalReviews]

Superb

[@EdilsonAmaral]

Any more videos on vCenter ?

[@Dean-rs2nt]

Can you change the ip addreaa at the top in vCenter to a name instead ??

[@leonelsalah8950]

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?

[@digitalworks9744]

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.

[@alfianwongso6896]

Thank you, Bro!

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

You're very welcome

[@williamcarter9749]

Justin, I recieved the red arrows of pain. I have been trying to fix it without luck. what can I do to fix it?

[@amirushsheli]

thanks so much

[@ymk2665]

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 ?

[@riadhossainbhuiyan4978]

Great to start with Vsphere ,Esxi 7

[@cobelali]

Tried to install ESXi, but the installation fails because it cannot find a network card. The network card is built into the motherboard.

[@seanwoods1526]

This was a fantastic video it really got me going in the right direction. Any chance on seeing that vSAN video?

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

Thank you. Unfortunately, vSAN is likely on the back burner for awhile as most of my videos will be security centric concepts

[@blinkybill4062]

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.

[@hussamjazrawy439]

hi can i have esxi7 for dell poweredge emc?

[@mr63249]

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

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

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

[@ITskintechpharmagroup]

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

[@Anuitu2u]

How to backup VM? 3rd party? Vmdk?

[@kylena8992]

I don’t understand, do I install this like I Install an operating system? I’m trying to use an old PC.

[@Lightforge88]

You are correct. vSphere would run as your operating system.

[@millschristophe]

What book would you recommend to learn VMware vSphere, ESXi ?? Ty

[@HichemComputer]

thank you so

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

You're welcome

[@tonyg460]

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?

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

Late response but yes!

[@KLYT325]

thanks

[@bradimsicke4493]

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?

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

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

[@djunleash]

Is the HP Z620 noisy?

[@sushantpatil515]

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

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

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

[@sajidalisundrani5890]

Nice video 😊

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

Thank you

[@davidye70]

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?

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

Just saw your other post

[@harwichsaint117]

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

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

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

[@tsaba2319]

Great

[@franciscobarron3784]

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?

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

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.

[@franciscobarron3784]

@@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?

[@donaldhunt4]

Great video! You laugh like Curly from the 3 Stooges.

[@mofaqalotaibi2854]

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.

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

What error is any shows up in vsphere?

[@ewangekang4960]

Great job Justin Please could you share a VMware online practice lab Thanks. I need to dirty my hands

[@zyxwvutsrqponmlkh]

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.

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

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

[@zyxwvutsrqponmlkh]

@@TellaroCyberResilience It's ok, just off in the weeds a bit. Would go well in a video specifically about vserver networking.

[@gam3955]

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 🚚

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

Unfortunately not. That requires vcenter

[@mikebmike1999]

Is it possible to do a separate VCENTER on a windows machine instead of an existing ESXi host? Specifically with v7

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

I believe the recommendation at this point (if not the requirement) is to deploy vcenter as a virtual appliance on top of vsphere.

[@ordahackney7131]

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?

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

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

[@ordahackney7131]

@@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?

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

@@ordahackney7131 Yes. We will. Also, on a single host you can implement vlans without doing so at the switch level

[@ordahackney7131]

@@TellaroCyberResilience So, I should not turn on vlans in the ESXi interface? Where you set yours to 300?

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

@@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

[@mirzaindra]

can we install it on Mac Mini M1 or Macbook M1?

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

I do not believe the M1 processors will support this.

[@LuvxJacqu4li8e]

What's the link from restarting to configuring the hosts. Are those hosts done thru Windows?

[@LuvxJacqu4li8e]

I get it. You have to manage it from another PC on the network?

[@TellaroCyberResilience]

Yes. You are correct

[@CharcoalProduction]

for me It goes straight to Appliance Manager

[@fbifido2]

@28:58 - is it possible for you to show me/us(KZbin), 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"

[@NSPK-]

🎁