Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 2.6
You can upgrade or
install ESXi as well
as choose to pre-
serve or overwrite
an existing VMFS
datastore.
These are the available actions:
Upgrade ESXi, Preserve VMFS Datastore: This option upgrades to ESXi 5.5 and pre-
serves the existing VMFS datastore.
◆
Install ESXi, Preserve VMFS Datastore: This option installs a fresh copy of ESXi 5.5
and preserves the existing VMFS datastore.
◆
Install ESXi, Overwrite VMFS Datastore: This option overwrites the existing VMFS
datastore with a new one and installs a fresh installation of ESXi 5.5.
◆
10.
Select the desired keyboard layout and press Enter.
11.
Enter (and coni rm) a password for the root account. Press Enter when you are ready to
continue with the installation. Be sure to make note of this password—you'll need it later.
12.
At the i nal coni rmation screen, press F11 to proceed with the installation of ESXi.
After the installation process begins, it takes only a few minutes to install ESXi onto the
selected storage device.
13.
Press Enter to reboot the host at the Installation Complete screen.
After the host reboots, ESXi is installed. ESXi is coni gured by default to obtain an IP address
via Dynamic Host Coni guration Protocol (DHCP). Depending on the network coni guration,
you might i nd that ESXi will not be able to obtain an IP address via DHCP. Later in this chapter,
in the section “Reconi guring the Management Network,” we'll discuss how to correct network-
ing problems after installing ESXi by using the Direct Console User Interface (DCUI).
VMware also provides support for scripted installations of ESXi. As you've already seen,
there isn't a lot of interaction required to install ESXi, but support for scripting the installation of
ESXi reduces the time to deploy even further.
