Welcome back to vSphere 8 in the real world. We're going to go over configuration of ESXi.
So in the last chapter, in the last lesson, after the demo of installing ESXi, I did go through and
do the initial configuration of the host. I did go in and choose the network adapter that I wanted
to use for my management network. I also assigned the adapter a VLAN ID. I assigned it an IP address.
I tested the configuration that I had on there and all those different settings. So this might
seem a little familiar. This is going to be kind of a recap of what we did on the last demo at the
end of the last chapter. So after you've installed ESXi, then the host is going to automatically
reboot and it's going to start up. Then you'll have the option of logging in through your console,
the DCUI, and you can configure some of the basic settings. You can give it an IP address. You can
choose what adapter you want it to use. You can choose if you want to assign a VLAN to that VM
kernel adapter. Do you want to assign a host name? What DNS servers do you want to use? You can also
then test those settings. So you can do system settings like the name, for example, network
settings, IP address, that kind of stuff. Storage settings, you're not going to do the DCUI. Your
storage settings you're going to do once you have finished that first configuration, the DCUI,
you'll log into the web interface and from there you can configure storage. You can attach to
shared storage or configure vSAN or whatever kind of storage configuration you're going to do.
So here at the console, I'll refer to the DCUI. You can do some configuration changes.
You can do some troubleshooting. You also have the ability actually of going out to a full-on
shell to where you can actually issue ESXi CLI commands and you can configure actually just
about anything you could do anywhere you can do from that shell. So you can do configure things
like storage, VM kernel ports, networking. You can look at VM virtual machine performance,
things like that. You can configure access controls, access to what resources you want
users to access. Troubleshooting, you have access to logs. You have access to ESXi top and a lot of
things like that. All right. You can also go to the vSphere client, either the vSphere client for
vCenter if the host is connected to vCenter. You also have a web interface you can connect to there
as well. All right. So some common things you might configure, you know, you might configure
keyboard settings. You might configure to the web console things like a banner when you log in.
You want a banner to be issued like, you know, only authorized access, that kind of thing.
And then through the console, through the DCUI, you have some manual boot options you can configure
as far as how you want the machine to boot up. You want to make sure you have your BIOS set
correctly for the right drive. Do you have a TPAM you need to configure or something like that.
This is just showing you the console. So I've logged in. I'm at the console on the host.
I hit F2 if I want to log in. I, you know, put in my root password and now this is the option where I
can configure a new root password if I want to. I can configure that management network. These are
the steps that we went through on the last demo from the last chapter where I showed you how you
can configure that management network, VLAN ID for the VM kernel port, IP addresses. You can restart
IP addresses. You can restart the management network. We tested the management network to make
sure that we could ping our default gateway and our DNS servers and things like that were all
working correctly. So all this is done through the console by pressing F2 and then entering your root
password. You can also log in through a web interface, right? You can log in through HTTP,
usually HTTPS. You don't want to have HTTP, you know, without the security enabled on that.
And you can use either a hostname or you can use the IP address of the host and connect to it.
You can use the vSphere client to manage your vCenter server if the host is in vCenter.
You can add the host to vCenter if it's not already in there.
All right. So again, hostname or IP address, either way.
So here's the thing. My root by default doesn't have a password. When you install ESXi, you have
to give it a password. You have to give it a password. It needs to be, you know, of a minimal
length. You want to make it, you know, long enough. You want to make it secure. Your company probably
has some kind of security policy as far as like password complexity and password lengths and
things like that. Make sure you're following your company policy or corporate policy
for root account access. It can be very dangerous if you use, you might, I've seen situations where
people have very secure passwords for vCenter but their root passwords and their hosts aren't secure
and they get hit with ransomware because they aren't able to compromise the host easily because
they have easy passwords to guess and their hosts are compromised. So that's a dangerous thing.
Make sure that, you know, you have secure root passwords for your host, very secure root passwords
for vCenter. Administrator password is very secure for vCenter. Any users, if you have like
Active Directory integration for vCenter, make sure that any users that are able to access
vCenter, you know, must have secure complicated passwords that change frequently.
So here's just showing that you, in the DCUI, you went and you chose the option to change the
root passwords. You're going to enter the old root password and then you can say the new one
and then you can confirm the new one and then enter it okay then. You want to configure the
networking as we discussed, as we showed you in the demo, the last demo. You're going to configure
network adapter. You want the VMkernel port, that first VMkernel that's created to use,
what VLAN ID, if it's a VLAN ID you want it to use, the IP address, subnet mask, default gateway,
all those good things there. Okay. You can also choose just to let it use DHCP.
I don't think I've ever seen an environment where their ESXi hosts are using DHCP. They
always have static IP addresses assigned. I've never once seen DHCP chosen as an option.
So here you can go in and check the settings. As we discussed, there's a bunch of different
things you can go in there and you can do. You can configure IPv4. You can configure IPv6.
You can set the address mask. All these things we actually have discussed and we also demoed
in the last lesson here. And this is just showing where you can say if you want to use DHCP or if
you want to set a static address and what the screen would look like, where you go in, you
would type in the IP address mask gateway. So that is basically the initial configuration,
that very first simple default configuration on a brand new installed ESXi host. So you've
installed your host, you went in, you were going to configure the VM kernel port for that first one.
Now you can access it through the web interface and configure any web settings,
more advanced settings you want to. You also are now able to bring it into vCenter,
add it to a cluster, and configure some of the more advanced settings you might want to do there.
If you have an Enterprise Plus license, maybe you'll add it to a distributed virtual switch
or something like that. But you now know how to install an ESXi host and get that initial
configuration on there so you can access that machine from the network.