i bought a new SERVER!! (VMware ESXi Setup and Install)

I got a new toy. You want to see it here? It is. It’s a server, the big boy to make room desk. I think I just crushed something. This is my new Dell power edge, our 17 rack Mount server for my lab. Wow.

Now this bad boy, isn’t new. I mean, it’s new to me, but I bought it used now. Why did I do this? Why did I buy this old server? Well, this is what you want to do. When you want to beef up your home lab, you’ll buy an awesome, massive,

Amazing server that enterprises have in their data centers. But we buy the older ones. They’re cheaper, but they still run great. Actually already have two in my lab. And I wanted one more because why not? So in this video,

I’m going to show you how to set up the home lab servers like this, and we’re gonna install the latest and greatest VMware on this bad boy, ESX or vSphere seven completely free. And it’s amazing. And it’s what enterprise it departments actually use.

So you’re gaining valuable skills. That’s the whole big idea, right? That’s why we’re here doing this also to run flux and all the other fun stuff, because you can do all of that here. Hey Chuck, from the future here, it turns out you can not install vSphere seven on old hardware,

Like the R seven 10. What? The junk VMware, why are you doing this man? Come on. So we’re stuck with VMware or vSphere six.seven or ESI six.seven, which is fine. It’s what I have currently installed in my other old servers. So we’re going to be proceeding with VAT. That is dumb. Isn’t it?

That’s pretty dumb. I spent a little bit trying to figure it out, but hardware just not fricking support it’s anyways. That’s why you see a bunch of hardware in the background because I had to figure it out and you’re welcome. Anyways. Let’s continue. Now you can do this too.

It’s a great way to learn enterprise 80 skills. You can pick up a server like this for not too bad. A check this out. I got my server from Amazon. Here’s the exact one I got. It’s awesome. If you want to check it out,

Link below only $645 and you could actually find them cheaper, like on eBay. Let’s check it out. Yeah. Here’s the one for 360 4, 1 10. It’s probably gutted a bit. Yeah, no HDD there. 201 26. Again, you can buy enterprise it hardware and put this in your house and it’s not too

Expensive. And shout out to Vesey shoes for sponsoring this video. We’ll talk more about them here in a bit. Okay. Let’s start doing this, but first, what do you need? Well, the first one’s kind of obvious. You need some sort of server now. Sure.

You can use an old laptop or an old desktop PC. You have laying around, but be careful not all hardware is supported by VMware. I ran into this when I was trying to install it on my laptop. So I chose proxy box instead. So be careful.

But if you do go out and buy some old enterprise hardware, that should work just fine. That’s why I do recommend old enterprise hardware. Now, once you have a server, the next few things are smooth sailing. You do need a USB flash drive. At least eight gigabytes. You’ll need a free VM-ware account,

Which we’ll walk through here in just a moment. And you’re going to need some coffee, espresso, French, press pour over. I don’t care. You just need some network. chuck.coffee. Oh, almost forgot. I’ve got um, oh, here it is. I’m going to install a 10 gig ethernet NIC. Because why not?

It’s good. That’s over here. And the pop this bad boy open. Oh yeah. And slide this 10 gig NIC in there. If you want to check it out, link below. I got it off Amazon. Amazon’s awesome. And bam, that was super fast and easy and

Oh, almost forgot. One last thing you’ll need is a monitor. That’s my monitor. I know. And it keyboard. So you can see what you’re doing when you actually install VMware. Yeah. That’s the thing. That’s all we need. Yeah. That’s it.

So here on VM-ware if you don’t already have an account and go create one, I already have one. I’m gonna get logged in real quick. And boom. Have you scroll down just a bit. First, we get a register for this product for ESI six.seven, almost at seven. No,

Just six.seven because VMware they’re being kind of jerks. Anyways, register. I got to tell them all about myself, things they already know. And two you’re actually okay. Captioning compared to most looking at you, CloudFlare and sign up. And now we have a pretty licensed key for VM-ware ESI, six.seven, which is fine.

I mean, I don’t want to be sphere seven. That’s cool. But this works too. So now all that’s left to do is download some stuff. It’s right here. We’re going to mainly download the latest and greatest. So click on manually.

Download mine is fricking fast. I was going to go and do it now. It’s right. There’s an ISO to a USB flash drive that we can use to install and tourist server we’ll need a tool. And the tool I’m gonna use is called a Rufus is what I always use.

If you have a Mac or Linux machine, there are other tools. I’ll link those below anyways. Rubis with Rufus. Makes sure we have the right device selected. I do. And then select your boot, ISO, whatever we’re gonna use to write to that thing.

Mine is going to not be seven because they’re jerks. I’m gonna use six.seven. Okay. Make sure your partition scheme is MBR. Make sure it’s bios or UFE, which is the only option I have. That’s all we need folks. I’m going to click on start and yeah, I know.

They’ll scare me with that kind of stuff. I know it’s going right over everything. We’re cool. Let it relax. Let it do its thing. Coffee break. If you want my coffee’s cold. So I’m not going to do that.

And it’s much later in the day now because I had to sneak and go through all this crap anyways. Do you feel my pain a little bit? Yeah. Done. Okay. Now we’re going to grab our USB drive. Got it.

Okay. Now we need to plug it into our server. I want to do that right now. Just anywhere you have a USB port in the back of it, right? Okay. About the power Dom, but first and need my monitor and my keyboard just plugged in and outside type the monitor

Crap. Okay. I’ve got a problem. These old servers, they have VGA connections, but not HTMI. And I don’t have a fricking VGA cable. Luckily I’ve got my Bessie shoes so I can run to the store real quick and grab some VGA cable. Bessie is a comfortable, stylish,

Everyday sneaker that you can wear even in the winter. Now these things are cool. Like climate cool. They’re made from something called diamond techs, which keeps you cool in the summer because summer’s happening right now in warm in the winter.

And it’s the true everyday sneaker for when you forget stuff that you need for your projects, like a cable like I did, and they are sustainably made less material waste with the knitting process, less waterways and no animal byproducts. They are vegan. Just don’t eat them crap. There’s a puddle. It’s okay.

PESI shoes are waterproof. 100%. Let me say it again. Waterproof, not water resistant. So you can walk in the snow. When it’s actually winter, they are super easy to clean. Just rinse with water. You can wear them right away or throw them in the washing machine. They’ll dry in a day.

So if you’re looking for a shoe that makes you look sexy at the data center, or if you’re just sitting at home hacking, this is the one for you. Besties are my go-to shoe right by my door. So check them out. Link below.

You’d like Chuck, you get $25 off your order right now. Boom. Hookah made it back. And just so you know, this ad was not planned. I really did have to run to the store and I totally forgot about this cable. It just kind of played in nicely. Can I?

All right. VGA plugged in now. Let’s power this bad boy up in. Nice and quiet. Huh? So quiet. Nice. Serene. Sounds like a jet plane. All right. Haven’t written a plane in a while. Here we go. We’re pretend we’re in a plane taking off. Oh, this is nice. Fiji Harris. Oh,

We’re almost there. We’re landing. Here we go. Oh yeah. All right. First thing I’m going to do real quick is make sure my raid, the configuration is good. So I’m going to go into F 10 system services and I’m going to make sure my rates stuff is good.

I don’t know what this shipped with. I’m going to change it up. Okay. This applies to Dell servers, only an old ones at that to go ahead and configure your rate to make sure everything’s golden. Good scroll down to hardware configuration tab over to configuration wizards.

You’re a wizard Harry and go to raid configuration. Now no. During the boot up, you can do a control arm to get to the right configuration. I was hitting that sucker and it wasn’t working. I don’t know why. Go ahead and hit. Enter to go next. Get my perks. 7, 8, 700.

That’s my rate controller. I’m good. Express is good for the stuff. And then choose your rate configuration. I’m going to do Ray five. I don’t want a hot spare tab to go to next and I will hit enter to finish. Yes, I do want to continue Dawn, I think. Yes. Okay, cool.

And then just get back and then tab over and exit and reboot. And now we wait once more. Oh yeah. Yes. Now at this point, my Dell server, I could hit F 11 to go into the Bootman USA boot to that USB flash drive.

I know that for mine. It’s just going to boot into it automatically. So if you do run into an issue where it doesn’t boot into your stuff automatically, then go to your bios venue and do that anyways. Mine’s going to do it. See you in a sec. Okay.

The ESI installer is launching and it’s going to go through and just check some things. We’re going to go. Yep. Let’s continue at 11 except everything. Blindly. It’s going to scan devices and hopefully everything is compatible. Fingers crossed. Oh, VMware, why are you me off? Show enough.

It’s on my rate controller. Everything’s beautiful. Enter to install ESX on that bad boy. Pick a keyboard stuff and then putting your root password. Just make it up, enter to continue. And then it tells me something I wish you would have told me.

Hours ago, future releases will support my CPU and crap. So yeah, whatever dude answer. And then finally hit F 11 to install. Boom. Let’s do this coffee break. If you’re still drinking coffee, I’m done. And installation is complete. Oh God VMware. You’re testing me, testing me. Okay.

So remove the installation media USB drive removed, and then hit the enter key to reboot. And now we wait again. It’s a lot of waiting stuff. So man, make sure you got something to do, like watch my next video. Yeah, go ahead and do that man. This thing is this thing’s hot. Yeah.

Yeah. Wait. Okay. So it’s booting up now. VM-ware ESI is loading. The hypervisor and stuff is happening. Magic is happening. Let’s watch and it’s fully booted. Okay. Sorry. I’m a little tired at this point. I want to go ahead and go to the IP address that it pulled via DHCP.

I’ll show you how to set that sucker static here in a moment. Actually, let’s go ahead and do that real quick. What about wasting time for F two to customize crap? It’s going to make you login with the root password. You just set. Remember it.

And then when those gone over to configure management network, which is just down there, hit enter, scroll to IPB four configuration it’s space bar on set static. There we go. And then enter your IP address information once you’re good at enter once more

And escape to X, Hey, he has to apply changes when you start your network. Cause you just changed stuff and you’re golden. So we should be able to go out through a web browser right now. Let’s try it out. Fingers fricking cross people 10, seven.one dot 94.

Oh, here we go. Proceed is unsafe. I don’t care. And that’s what we want to see right here. Long game with the roots and the password you just said just smells so good for slept. Feed don’t work for once. Okay, cool. We’re vulnerable to some kind of attack, whatever.

Just don’t expose your server to the internet. Oh, currently we’re in evaluation mode. Let’s change that. Let’s go grab our license. Let’s snag my license. Just going to copy that. They’re right here on the left and go to manage. And then right here, licensing,

Click on a sign license and then enter that delicious license key. He just got check license or good. And now assign it. Whoo. Yes. Okay. We’re good. So now I officially have a license. VMware. He is excited. Six dot set on which? Yeah, I know it’s not seven dot. Oh,

But it’s still great. I’ve been using it for years and it’s pretty lit. I love it. Over here on storage, like click on that. I have one data store here, which the data store is real story. Your virtual machines where you’ll create your virtual machines, machine disks. It’s a real store.

Everything for now because this is the only one I have noticed is almost four terabytes. That’s the location I installed ESI on. And yeah, at this point you can go about creating a virtual machine. Now I’ll walk you through real quick, how to create your first one.

So you’re not lost anyways. If I go to virtual machines, nothing here is so lonely. So dark and scary. Let’s click on, create or register AVN. Now to do this, we obviously will need an ISO like Ubuntu or Cali Linux or anything.

So I’ll make sure I have create new virtual machine, uh, selected click on next, um, name it. Let me make sure I have an ISO somewhere. Oh cool. How do we Bluetooth 18. Awesome. So guests, family, Linux. It’s going to be,

Oh Boone 2 64 bit next. Yes. That’s my data store. And then choose your stuff. I’m going to throw two virtual. CPU’s at it. Two gigs of memory, 2048. And then the most important part. I have to make sure that this virtual machine will boot to a CD drive to load it

To us. So we’re going to change the host device here to an ISO. You download. So change that to data store ISO file. That’s going to go to the data store. I just showed you right now. I’ve got nothing here. So it real quick.

I like to do this. I’m going to create a directory to name it ISOs or the directory. This is where I’m going to keep mine ISOs and make sure I select that. And I’m going to go ahead and upload when I have here,

There he is cooking right here. We’ll give it a sec. It is uploaded. I will select it. Oh wait. Yes, I will select it. There we go. Select and make sure we have the checkbox here connected at power on because you want to have to connect it at the power of the on,

I think that’s about all we have to do here. I’ll make the hard disk, like I don’t know, 50 gigs just for funsies. We can always, you can always change that later on click next. And that’s the first virtual machine click on finish and that bad boys cooking.

I think actually that bad boy has done. And then there he is just sitting there doing nothing. We got to boot him up first. So let’s go ahead and click on the jump in. And I’ll like a only penguin. We just hit that power button right there.

The power on appear, just tickled his belly to, he goes belly. That was weird. It’s going to boot up and give you a little window and you gonna be able to proceed to install your Linux distro. Now I’m not gonna make you wait,

Go ahead and fast forward to the future. And it’s done installed. I’m going to log into it just to prove it to you that this is the TD Linux server on the wait wrong username. Boom. This is create a virtual machine. So anyways, we installed an enterprise hypervisor on an old enterprise hardware

That we bought off of Amazon. Or maybe eBay. Now, why do this again? It’s great practice to learn actual enterprise it skills. Secondly, it’s awesome for your home lab. Seriously, a ton of stuff I run and feature in my videos runs off of servers like this.

Actually I haven’t [inaudible] that other one and our seven 20 and I just throw a bunch of virtual machines running all kinds of stuff. Sure. They’re not the fastest machines in the world. No, they’re not, but I’m not gaming on these bad boys. They’re just running some stuff in my house.

You don’t need something crazy to run Docker containers, a couple domain controllers. I mean, come on and what you can learn on these things. It’s insane. I mean, come on. I mean, just from, from setting up enterprise, it stuff like actual stuff that produces an infrastructure and a company to just

Doing hacky labs. This is awesome. So anyways, let me know if this helps you out in the comments below this took longer than I expected, just because of dumb VMware and their requirements for VM-ware seven. It was supposed to be vSphere stuff it’s supposed to be really cool.

It’s still trunk pretty cool. I mean $6. Seven is still cool. Anyways, I’m still better. And again, massive shout out to Vesey, footwear for sponsoring this video and giving us shoes that can help us go get stuff when we need stuff like VGA cables on the old servers. Yeah. Yeah.

That’s about all I got today. Guys. I will catch you all next time. I’m going to install some more virtual machines. Oh, uh, just while you’re still here watching the video, I’m looking at my 10 gig NIC over here. Look at that 10,000 Davids per second.

It’s going to be putting that to use anyways. That’s all I got.