ESXi 5.0 – Installation Guide

This is first page in this series and I’m looking forward to your comments.
As the title describe itself, I’d demonstrate the installation process of “VMware ESXi 5.0” and I’ll note any changes from previous version.
This would be simple installation on clean system, I’ll make other posts for “Upgrading ESXi 4.x to ESXi 5.0” and “Basic Configuration of ESXi 5.0”.
I’m using “virtual machine (vm)” for this demo but all steps are same for the physical host and white-boxes (wb).

Step 1:
Powering on the system and inserting media to the drive, It could be CD or ISO file; here I have connected the ISO file to the VM and power it on

   

Step 2:

After system detects the media and load it, it will prompt for selecting between two items.
Fist one is for installing VMware ESXi 5.0 and second one is for continuing boot process from local disk.
As I want to install VMware ESXi 5.0, I’m selected the first item and pressed enter.

Step 3:
In this step, system will start “Loading ESXi Installer” while loading multiple modules which is needed for installation process; the appearance of this step changed but there was something similar in previous version.

 

Step 4:
After loading those modules, ESXi Installer will load “Black & Yellow” screen which is familiar to previous versions user and will continue loading required module and drivers.

 

Warning 1:
During “step 4” if the installer can’t find the proper and compatible NIC, it will generate an error just after this step and will terminate th installation process as shown in the following screen shot; I’ve tested VMXNET2 and VMXNET3 for base vm and non of them are compatible, so E1000 seems to be a right choice if ESXi 5.0 is going to be installed in vm.

Step 5:
After installer detected NIC and loaded modules, it will prompt with “Welcome” message, so I Pressed “Enter” for moving to the next step.

Step 6:
After welcome, user should read the “End User License Agreement (EULA)”  and if they are agreed they should press “F11” to continue the installation process; otherwise, pressing “ESC” would terminate the installation process.

Step 7:
Installer will scan for controller and storage connected to them in this step.

Warning 2:
In this step, if the installer can’t find a compatible controller or disk, it will not show any disk and because of this matter the installation process can not be continued; I’ve tested “VMware Paravirtual” SCSI controller for base vm and installer didn’t detect any storage, so I changed SCSI controller to “LSI Logic Parallel” and it works fine.

Step 8:
If the installer find a compatible controller and detects its storage, it will show them in this step so user can select one of available storage and pressing “Enter” to continue.

Step 9:
This step is new and added in ESXi 5.0 and it will help user to select their keyboard layouts, in this step I selected “English” and pressed Enter for continuing the process.

Step 10:
This step is new too and I personally like it as it will ask user for entering the password for “root” account before continuing the process.

This password must be at least 7 characters and user needed to enter the password two times (main and confirmation).

 

Step 11:
Now installer will scan system again.

Warning 3:
In “step 11” installer will checking some BIOS parameters and if any configuration is not correct it will prompt for it.

Step 12:
This would be last step before copying files and the “ESXi Installer” will ask user for confirmation; if all configuration up to now is correct, user can continue the process by pressing “F11” or going back for making some changes by pressing “F9”. here I pressed “F11” to continue.

Step 13:
Installer will start copying files and making required changes on them base on configuration made during these steps, it would be finished soon base on system specification and in my case it toke about 3~4 minutes.

Step 14:
It’s last step and installer will prompt with “evaluation mode” and “connection” information and will ask to remove the source media and rebooting the system.

 

Step 15:
VMware ESXi installation finished by previous reboot on “step 14” and system will boot base on configuration.