Welcome back to vSphere 8 in the real world. Let's discuss deploying a VM.
So there's different ways you can deploy VMs. The first thing you can do is just create a VM from scratch.
You can right-click and say new VM and just define everything about that VM you want to be.
You can tell them how many CPUs and how much RAM and what operating system you want to use and what port group you want the VM to be on.
All of those settings you can do. That's completely from scratch going through this wizard.
It's not a huge pain, but it does take time. If I needed to do 100 VMs that way, it would take you quite a while to do that.
You can also deploy from a template, which means I've already gone in and I went to the first part of creating the virtual machine.
Right-click, new VM, and I chose all the different options and all the customizations I wanted to do.
I don't need a USB controller, so I removed that. I changed the number of virtual CPUs I want.
I added a second hard drive if that's what I need to do. All the different things, all the customizations I want.
Then I completed that deployment. I logged into it. I installed an operating system, so I installed Windows.
I got all the Windows updates up to date. I installed my applications on there. I did all that stuff.
This whole thing took me, with the updates and everything, took me two and a half hours to get all this done.
Now I need another one. I can go through and do all those same steps again, and it can take me another two and a half hours.
I have to do this for 10 virtual machines, so it takes me three days to deploy these.
Or the thing I could do is, that first one that took me two and a half hours, I can save it by converting it to a template.
After I convert it to a template, I can just right-click on that template, and I can say I want to deploy a VM from that template.
It'll ask me a couple of questions, like what name do I want to name it.
I can say if I need to do any customizations. I can have a customization file already ready for it, and I can just deploy from that.
That would take me maybe a minute or a few seconds, and I can right-click and do it again and do it again.
When all those are done, they all have their operating systems configured. They already have their applications deployed.
I didn't have to go through and customize all the hardware.
I didn't have to add more virtual CPUs or remove the USB controller or do any of those things.
All that stuff was done because it was already in the template.
A template is a preconfigured virtual machine that has an operating system and maybe applications and all ready to go,
so you can deploy a VM in minutes versus hours.
Every once in a while, you might want to convert your template back to a VM, power it on, patch it, power it off,
and convert it back to a template, so when you deploy your next set of VMs from there, they're patched and current and ready to go.
You might want to maintain those templates. It's something to consider.
You can actually also deploy a VM from a VM.
It doesn't have to be a template because all a template is is a virtual machine with its VMX file out of a slightly different extension,
VMTX instead of VMX.
I can actually have a virtual machine, and it can actually be running, and I can clone a VM from it.
When I'm done, it will be a completely new virtual machine.
It will have a different MAC address.
If you went through your customization with it, you have a different GUID and everything,
brand-new VM that will boot up and be ready to go with all the same applications,
all the same files that were on the hard drive, patching up to the moment of the source VMs patching, all of that.
You can also clone, as we mentioned before, clone a template.
When they talk about a golden image, a golden image can be your template,
or a golden image could be a virtual machine that Horizon uses as that master.
So a golden image can be referred to from different meanings.
If you're talking about templates specifically, though, then it's going to be that machine that has the VMTX file.
So templates are a golden VM, as we said.
A golden image is kind of a term that's kind of used in a lot of different ways,
but a template is that golden image VM, meaning it's the standard that has all the configuration.
It has all the applications.
We may have done some patching on it already.
Hopefully, we've maintained that patching on that VM.
So when we deploy new ones, they're all set, ready to go.
Everything that was in that template, the operating system, the applications,
if I put shortcuts into a folder someplace, if I put files on the hard drive someplace,
all that same stuff is there.
If a user's logged into it on the template, that same user account will be logged into that one as well.
All right.
So all the settings come with that template.
So vSphere 8 configuration limits for a virtual machine.
Virtual machine CPUs per VM, 768.
Hopefully, you'll need a lot more than that.
RAM, 24 terabytes.
SCSI adapters, up to 4.
Max virtual disk size, 62 terabytes.
Max virtual NICs per VM, 10.
It's been limited to 10 since 3.5 and probably even before 3.5.
10 NICs per VM is the max.
In a virtual machine, you don't really often need that many, you know, network adapters on a VM.
But there are some times when you wish you could get more and sometimes a lot more.
Hyper-V can let you get a lot more.
So it's odd to me that VMware has always stuck with 10.
But virtual NICs per VM, 10.
Persistent memory per VM, 6 terabytes.
So persistent memory, as we mentioned in a previous lesson,
persistent memory is kind of like a hard disk that the system can treat as memory.
But it can actually be set up with an operating system and applications and everything on this persistent memory.
So when you power on the VM, all this information, like the operating system applications and things like that, are already there.
So in environments where you need very fast boot times and very fast performance from a virtual machine,
where you want to be even faster than, say, reading from, you know, a hard disk, you can use persistent memory.
So it's a special kind.
It goes into a slot like a NVMe drive or a flash drive, but it's a different kind of disk.
It's, again, it's called persistent memory, and it will let you boot up systems much faster than, like,
loading Windows from a hard drive would.
So if you want to create and deploy VMs, you can use the VM wizard, right?
All you're going to do is right-click on your, you know, either your cluster or on a host, you know,
somewhere in your vCenter there, and say you want to create a new virtual machine, right?
You can choose where you want to place it.
If you want to put it into a cluster, if you want to put it into a resource pool, if you want it to land on a specific host,
you can choose all those options, right?
You can also choose your activity dropdown menu and say new virtual machine from there.
Basically, right-clicking in the activity menu are kind of the same,
just different ways of getting to that same menu option.
So creating and deploying VMs, when you want to create a new VM, you have some things you need to consider.
Do you want to deploy from a premade template?
Do you want to clone from a VM?
So you can actually do that.
You can clone from a template to a template, and you can convert a template to a virtual machine.
So if you have a VM, or I'm sorry, a template you want to patch and update,
you can convert it back to a virtual machine and then patch and update it and then convert it back to a template.
You can't start a template.
You can't power on a template.
That's why you need to convert it back to a VM.
So when you go to deploy it, first you need to determine where you want to place it.
Then you have to give it a name.
So, you know, what are you going to call it?
And then you have to determine where you want to place it.
So from there you can say, I just want to place it into this cluster, for example.
And once you start going through that wizard, it'll say, okay, what cluster, from what cluster,
what host in the cluster do you want to put it into, right?
So there I chose a cluster, and now it's asking me what host on there, what compute resource do I want to use.
So for storage, you can choose what type of storage you're going to use.
That's going to be dependent upon the storage the VM is going to need, right?
If your VM is going to be running a SQL database, then you might need some really fast storage for that SQL database.
You might create a virtual disk for that and put that virtual disk on a different data store than where you put the C drive disk
or where the disk is running your operating system.
Now, some of the things to consider is what you're choosing here in this wizard at first is what's the home folder for that virtual machine.
So this is where you're going to be putting the VMX file.
This is where your swap's going to go.
This is where all those files that define what the VM is are going to go.
And by default, the VMDKs go there, too.
But you can choose to put these VMDKs someplace else.
If you decide to storage vMotion in the VM, what you're changing is this home folder, right?
So you're changing where, like, the VMX file and all those things are going.
You can choose to put the VMDK files, again, during storage vMotion someplace else, right?
So here we're choosing a data store for that home folder.
So compatibility, what version of ESXi do you want to make this compatible with?
Now, maybe we're running 8 on the host that you selected.
And if you were to say, okay, I want to make it compatible with 8, I'm running 8, let's make it compatible with 8,
then it can't run on anything older than 8.
But if I know in my environment I have some 7 update 3 and I have some 8,
so I haven't upgraded all the hosts to 8 yet,
or I haven't replaced all the old 7 update 3 hosts with new 8 hosts yet.
So I have both running in my environment,
and I might need to move this VM from the 8 that I selected to the 7 update 3.
Then here I can't choose 8.
I need to choose 7 update 3 at the newest.
So choose what version of ESXi you want to make it compatible with.
If you know all your hosts are the latest, greatest, newest 8.
By the way, it won't show you anything here newer than what you have for the host you selected, right?
So if you're running, you know, 8.0 update 1, but update 3 is out,
it won't show you 8.3 here because, first of all, 8.1 won't even know about it, right?
So if vCenter is not running update 3, you're not going to see update 3 as an option.
So what version of ESXi do you want to choose?
What guest OS do you want to use?
And this is actually pretty important.
You might think it's not really that big a deal, but actually it really does matter.
If you choose a Linux OS and you try installing Windows, you might see a lot of errors,
vice versa, okay?
So if you're running Linux, it'll say, okay, what kind of Linux?
I'm running Alma Linux.
I'm running Red Hat.
What version of Red Hat?
It'll have 7 and 8 and 9 and all the different versions of Red Hat in there.
If you're running, say, if I'm running Windows Server, Windows Server 2016,
Windows 2012, 2024, what version of Windows Server do you want to run?
So that's the options you'll need to choose there,
the family and the version of the OS you're trying to run.
Then customizing the hardware.
From here I can choose how many virtual CPUs I want to have,
how much RAM I want to have.
The hard disk size.
So this first disk here, this would probably be on a Windows box, my C drive,
where I'm going to install my operating system.
I can also say I want to add additional components.
I want to add another hard drive.
I want a D drive and I want to make it X size.
You can choose another network adapter.
For the network adapter that's already in there, I can choose, for example,
the driver I want to install on it.
Do I want to use a VMXnet 3?
Do I want to use an E1000 driver?
There's different driver options.
So it will emulate or virtualize a different NIC,
and so an E1000 driver inside your OS would work.
If you have a VM that you're not going to be running the VMware tools on,
then you probably want to choose the E1000.
The E1000 is going to be the best performing virtual NIC other than the
VMXnet 3.
If you're going to be installing VMware tools,
then you'll get the driver for the VMXnet 3 at the same time,
and so that will be the best performing adapter for you.
Linux systems can usually use the E1000,
and you don't have to install VMware tools on most Linux systems.
The host kind of already has them,
or the distribution oftentimes already has the drivers in there,
but you'll use the E1000 network adapter because it has an Intel E1000
driver in there already.
So what can be configured?
CPU cores, memory, hard disk size, how many hard disks you want to use,
what kind of SCSI controller you want, what network adapter,
as we mentioned before.
The CD-ROM drive, you can mount an ISO onto the CD-ROM drive at this time.
Your video card, how much video memory do you want it to have,
how many video cards do you want to have,
what kind of display settings you want on there.
So a lot of different things like that can be configured.
So here's CPU.
So what we can do on the CPU is we can set the CPU topology.
What that basically is talking about is I can actually say on the CPU,
I want a CPU with – I want two CPUs and two cores each.
So it would kind of be like four CPUs, right?
Four cores that can do processing for me.
But it would look like it's two sockets.
Or I can say I want one socket with four cores, all right?
So if you've got software that is licensed per socket,
you might want to choose per socket.
If you don't, then you might want to choose multiple sockets
and then cores in there.
And then it will actually distribute the workload for that machine,
saying, oh, this is supposed to be one socket,
and put these threads on one physical socket
and the other socket with two cores will go on two other sockets,
two threads to the other socket.
It will break them up that way.
We can also set up things like reservations.
We can set a minimum amount of CPU that has to always be held
in reserve just for this VM.
We can also put limits,
saying you can't use more than a certain amount of megahertz
on this processor.
We can also do hardware virtualization.
What we can basically do is we can go in
and allow performance counters to pass through.
We can also say we want the VT, virtual technology,
extensions from the CPU, passed to the VM.
You'd want to do something like that if we're doing
virtualization nesting, meaning I'm running ESXi on my host
and I want an ESXi virtual machine inside of there,
that's going to then again run virtual machines.
So you need the VT extensions passed through from the host
to the guest OS.
And here's that topology, right,
where we can specify things in there,
like do we want to allow hot plug in there,
how many CPUs we want to have, how many cores per socket
do we want to configure, things like that.
So memory, I can specify how much RAM,
minimum 256 megabytes for Windows, maximum 2,128 gigs.
So for the dropdown menu, we can go through,
we can configure how much RAM we want to have,
and then we can set, again, reservations,
how much RAM is absolutely set aside just for this host.
Maybe I can figure out on a VM 12 gigs of RAM
for this Windows box, but I want to reserve 2 gigs.
I want to make sure it always has these 2 gigs for it
no matter what.
If you're not over-provisioning your RAM,
then you won't have contention that's going to make this
even take effect, and the reservation won't matter
because they'll all have all that they're allocated for,
all they're configured for.
This only matters if you're starting to really heavily
over-allocate RAM to your VMs,
then reservations might start to become important.
So will things like shares.
Shares and limits.
Limits will say this is the max amount of physical RAM,
so you probably never actually do this,
but let's say you configured it for 12 gigs
and you give it a limit of 8,
it can actually never use more than 8.
The VM thinks, the OS thinks it has 12.
It's going to try and write from 8 up to 12.
Those 4 gigs have to always be paged.
All right, so be careful with your limits.
And shares say if we have contention to CPU or to RAM
or to our storage, how much of that resource do I get?
VMs that all have the same number of shares
will have the same amount of access.
VMs that have more will have more access
based upon how many more shares they have.
If you have twice as many shares,
you have twice as much access.
All right?
If you have half the number of shares,
you have half the access.
And hotplug just simply means,
can we add RAM to the VM on the fly
without shutting down the OS?
Here's our hard disk.
So we can go in there and say the size.
We can customize what size we want it to be.
We can also assign storage policies that have things like,
you know, are we going to use encryption or not
and things like that, right?
So whatever our storage policy is defined
will be passed on and inherited to that disk.
We can specify the location of the hard disk.
Okay, that's kind of an important one.
By default, whatever the home folder is
for that virtual machine,
that's where the hard disk is going to go.
If I create a new hard disk, that's where it's going to go.
I can say I want this hard disk stored someplace else.
And that is a pretty important thing because, again,
I might have some storage that has a bunch of spinning disks
and performance is just fine,
and that's where I put my C drive for my operating system.
But I have this flash storage that's really fast,
but it's also really expensive,
and I only put applications on it
that need that level of performance.
So I might put my D drive with my SQL database
over on that flash storage, right,
so that way I get better performance,
but I'm not wasting that performance
on my operating system, for example.
Also, provisioning.
Do I want to do thick provisioning or thin?
Thick eager zeroed, thick lazy zeroed, or thin?
And then, of course, we have sharing.
We have shares. We have limits.
We have IOP limits on there, okay?
Hard disk mode, is it independent or dependent?
So independent, we have independent persistent.
Disk configuration remains after a power cycling, right,
non-persistent.
So basically, if it's independent, I can run it,
make a bunch of changes, shut it down,
and the configuration, all the changes are gone, right?
Dependent means I keep all my changes.
Virtual device, no.
So basically, is this going to be a SCSI disk?
Will the guest OS see it as a SCSI disk, as an IDE disk,
or as a SATA disk?
And then for SCSI controllers, so I can choose a SCSI disk.
A SCSI disk is going to be a SCSI controller to connect to.
So the different types we have available,
we have bus logic parallel, LSI logic parallel, LSI logic SAS,
and VMware ParaVirtual.
So the VMware ParaVirtual,
that is going to require VMware tools,
and that is going to be like a really high-performing virtual
adapter.
All the ones that are like VMware-specific are going to be
high-performing adapters.
SCSI bus sharing, so we can say we want to allow none,
virtual or physical.
So basically, none means we're not allowing it.
Physical means that we can actually connect to physical
devices, and virtual means it virtualized through the SCSI
virtualization.
Stay at the network.
So this is one of the more important things.
All this is pretty important.
If you mess up your disk adapters,
it's going to be really difficult to fix that.
But networking is one of the things I see the most often.
People have to go back and change,
because they've made a wrong selection.
So do you want the network adapter connected to power on?
Most of the time that's set to yes,
but sometimes we do set that to no,
because we're staging VMs that are going to replace other VMs,
and we don't want there to be an IP address conflict or something
like that.
Or it's running a service,
and we don't want the service to be seen by the network,
and so I don't connect the network adapter.
So what it would look like to the VM is if the cable is
unplugged.
That's what it looks like from the VM.
So do you want to set power on or not?
The adapter type, there is the VMX.3,
and you can also choose an E1000.
There's also the PVRDMA,
basically allows for the VDRMA to be communicated over between VMs
or to the physical network.
So we can do this whole RDMA thing over our networking.
PCI passthrough means that the VM actually takes control of the
PCI device.
It actually owns that network card.
That network card is no longer available to the host to use for the
other VMs.
It's owned by that virtual machine.
MAC address, static or automatic.
So static means you are going to type in a MAC address,
whereas automatic means it's going to automatically configure one and
put it in the VMX file.
Static, you're going to type it in and it gets put in the VMX file.
You might do static.
It's obviously going to be really rare.
It used to be a little tiny bit more common when applications were
sometimes licensed by the MAC address.
And so if I'm moving the application from a physical box to a VM and I
want to keep my license, I have to keep that MAC address.
And so that's one of the more often times that's how I would see that
used.
It's almost never used anymore.
CD-ROM drive, probably the most common thing you're going to select
here is what ISO you want the CD-ROM drive to use.
The CD-ROM drive could use the CD-ROM drive that's in the host.
So if you have a CD in the CD-ROM drive in the host,
most hosts don't have CD-ROM drives anymore.
You could also say if you're, you know, the client device,
so if you're connected to the vSphere client
and you have a CD-ROM drive on your computer,
you could actually pass that to the host.
But nowadays, it's almost always going to be an ISO that you are
mounting on that CD-ROM drive.
And then if you want to say if you want that connected also or not.
All right.
And you can specify, you know, if that is IDE or SATA,
how is it connected to the virtual machine.
So video card, number of displays that you want,
how much video memory do you want?
Now, you can put in video memory in here.
You can put a little bit.
You can put more.
If you're trying to do more displays,
that means you need more video memory for better performance.
Keep that in mind.
If you have a video adapter that supports, you know, 3D pass through,
then you can also enable 3D graphics pass through to the virtual machine.
Multiple displays is probably more common on VMs that are being used for VDI.
For, you know, servers, it's not used hardly ever.
So you've gone through.
You've made a lot of selections, right?
You have configured the CPU.
You configured memory.
You gave it one or more hard drives.
You configured one or more network adapters
and a bunch of different things.
You could also in there remove things.
So a lot of VMs have USB controllers on them.
You don't usually need USB controllers on most virtual machines.
You can go there and remove the devices you don't need, things like that.
You've made all those different options, you know, selections,
and you can click finish.
And when you click finish, it's going to go through.
You'll see a task running at the bottom.
It takes a moment.
It doesn't take too long.
And when it's all done, then you will see the VM in your vCenter.
You can click on it, click the little triangle play icon to power it on.
When you first power it on, it won't have an operating system,
but if you mounted an ISO in it, it can boot to a, you know,
a Windows ISO or a Linux ISO or whatever, you know,
operating system you have in that CD-ROM drive that the ISO device is for,
and you can start your installation from there, right?
So you can launch the console.
You see where it says power off.
That will show you a little thumbnail of what would be on the monitor if
this was a physical machine, and you can click in there,
or you can say you want to launch a remote console,
launch it to a web browser in a separate tab,
and you can start going through your guest OS installation from that.
So here we go.
We see that we've gone through,
and we've installed Ubuntu on this virtual machine.
Now that we've discussed deploying virtual machines,
let's go to our lab environment and deploy some virtual machines.
So here in this lab environment, this is VMware's hands-on lab environment,
so it's hol.vmware.com,
and I just took their one-on-one introduction to VMware Lab to show you,
here we have some virtual machines.
Now we can go in and let's go ahead and just create a new virtual machine.
We don't have an ISO in this environment to walk through the installation,
but we can walk through actually creating the VM.
And I'll show you one way to do it by creating a new VM,
let's say a new virtual machine.
And we're going to say, okay, yes, as we want to do,
we want to create a virtual machine.
And we're going to give the VM a name.
Let's go ahead and call this lab01.
And we've got to choose the compute resource we want to put this in,
so I'm going to go ahead and choose a host to put this on.
And then it wants to know what storage we want to put the VM on,
so I'm going to go ahead and just choose this iSCSI storage here.
It does also support NFS, either one would be fine.
The compatibility mode,
so if all of my hosts in my environment are running 8,
then I can go ahead and choose 8 or later,
or I could go in and say, well,
actually I have some 7.0 update 2 in my environment,
so I want to choose compatibility with that.
Here we have all 8, so I'm going to go ahead and say 8.
What OS are we going to install?
If we're running Windows, we would say, obviously, Windows,
and choose what version of Windows we're installing.
We have 2022 and 19.
We could choose a Windows desktop operating system.
If we're running some version of Linux, we would say Linux,
and then choose a distribution.
As you can see, there's a lot of different distributions, Alma Linux,
Rocky Linux, a bunch of RHEL.
There's a bunch of different things in there we could choose from,
some Debian.
You can also just choose a generic version based upon the version of
the kernel that you're running, or you're running Ubuntu.
It doesn't really matter for this example,
because we don't actually have an ISO to install,
so we can just say we're going to run Windows.
Now, what this kind of does matter for is basically the defaults.
If I were to choose Windows,
then VMware has some default suggestions for, like,
the minimum amount of virtual CPU, the minimum amount of RAM,
hard disk space.
And then also, VMware knows if I'm running Windows Server 2022,
this supports certain features.
Like, can I hot add CPU, or am I able to hot add RAM,
hot add virtual disk, right?
If I chose a version of Linux, then it might say, okay,
well, what version of Linux?
Well, I'm running a really old version of RHEL that, you know,
doesn't support a bunch of virtualization features,
or I'm running a newer version of RHEL that does support these
different virtualization features, right?
So, what OS you choose is actually pretty important,
because VMware will say, oh, based upon what you chose,
it's going to be your guest operating system.
We know these features are supported.
We know this is recommended minimum hardware and things like that.
The minimum hardware isn't as important because you can always easily
overwrite that, but VMware knowing what features are supported by the
operating system or what features are not supported by the operating
system are actually pretty important.
All right, so I'm going to say Windows Server here, say next.
And here they're saying this is really the bare minimum.
So, here we're saying that the minimum,
that the hardest size we chose is greater than the data store that
we've selected.
What we could do is we can scroll down and see how it says this thick
provision lazy zeroed.
If we thin provision this, we can still create that disk of that size,
and then we can move this VM to a different data store later.
So, we resolved the lack of disk space issue by thin provisioning that
virtual disk.
And I can say how many virtual CPUs I want, right?
We can go in, specify the number of CPU.
We can say if we want, you know, any kind of reservations or limits,
that kind of stuff on this.
We can also go in how much RAM, 4 gigs.
If we needed more, we could say we wanted more.
The network driver, we can specify the network card.
We can specify if we want the adapter to connect that power on.
Connect that power on basically means, like,
the adapter is plugged into an interface on a switch, right?
We want that to be connected.
Or if we unplug this, it'd be like unplugging the cable.
The NIC is still there, but the cable will show as unplugged.
We can also choose what kind of NIC we want to virtualize.
We can say we want to use a VMXFET3, which is, like, the best performing.
The problem is that we won't be able to use the adapter
until we install VMware tools, right?
If we need this VM to come online right away, connect to the network,
get a DHCP address, run certain scripts and files,
then we'll want to use the E1000,
and we might need to upgrade that to the VMXFET3 at a later date.
We can also say what virtual network we want to connect to,
and we have a few different ones here already.
By default right now we're just saying VM network,
and that's fine for this demo.
Maybe we wanted to connect to a different distributed virtual switch
because we needed to connect to a certain VLAN that's, you know, on that one.
We could choose that.
You could also specify the SCSI controller.
The LFI logic's fastest by default for Windows,
but there are other options.
We wanted to choose one of the other options.
Again, VMware ParaVirtual would need to have VMware tools installed on there for that.
That is an option also.
Do we want a USB controller?
Now, in some situations, if we're like, we're not going to need this,
we're not going to need that, you might want to go in
and just do something like maybe just, like, remove that device.
Like, we don't need USB on this virtual machine for any reason.
I know I don't need it, so I'm just going to go ahead and delete that, right?
So, once we've gone through, oh, one kind of last thing.
If we did have an ISO for an operating system we wanted to boot from,
we could say we wanted to boot from an ISO,
and then we would have to go to the data store that has that ISO uploaded to it,
select it, and then when this machine powered on,
it would boot to that ISO for installing the operating system.
But for here, we can just say we want to use the client device.
So, that would mean the device that this browser is from,
or we can also say the host device.
So, the ESXi host itself, if they have a CD-ROM drive in it,
and there's a disk in there, it's going to connect to that CD-ROM drive.
The downside of this option is that when this is connected,
if this is powered on and that box connected is checked,
then we're connected to this local ESXi host CD-ROM device,
and I can't vMotion this VM off of this device if that is selected
and that box is checked.
Now, if that box is unchecked, I'll get a warning telling me
that I have that configured but that I'm not connected.
If it's connected, I'll get an error and vMotion would fail.
We can go ahead and say next here, and then these are all the options.
Yep, that's what I want to do.
I'm good there.
Say finish.
And we will see that work went in,
and we created that virtual machine.
It's completed.
So, then I could go in, if I had that option selected,
that ISO in there, and right-click on that and power it on.
Now, another thing I could do is I can also create a VM from another VM,
or I can create a VM from a template.
So, what I'm going to do here is I'm going to right-click on this
Windows 10 machine.
Notice it's even running.
It's up and running.
It's not necessarily the best way of doing this,
but with a VM that's up and running even, right-click on it,
and I can say I want to clone, either clone to a virtual machine
or clone to a template.
Just for this example, I'm going to say I'll go ahead
and clone to a virtual machine.
Give this machine a name.
Choose where I want to put it.
I'll say next.
I've got to choose my compute resource again.
Select the storage for this guy.
And do I want to change anything?
Do I want to customize the operating system?
In an actual real scenario, doing a Windows machine like this,
we want to customize the OS.
We'd want to run like a sysprep on there so that it creates a new GUID.
We're going to change the computer's name, all that kind of stuff, right?
Do you want to customize the machine's hardware so I can check that box?
And when I got to this next option, it'll ask me,
do I want to change, you know, the number of virtual CPUs?
Do I want to add more RAM or anything like that?
Do I want to add a device?
Do I want this one here to have an additional hard drive
or something like that, right?
If I don't need to customize any of that, then I wouldn't check that box.
I would just say next, and it would go through its sysprep.
I'm going to say finish here.
When it powers on, it would go through and just kind of sysprep it for me.
So now you can see it's cloning that virtual machine.
Let's give this a few minutes.
It takes a couple minutes for this to go through the whole process of cloning.
All right, so the clone is completed.
That job is completed, and I have that new virtual machine here.
So another option I would have had or could have is when I right-click on this VM,
it would also say I want to clone it.
Instead of cloning it to a virtual machine,
I could choose to clone it to a template, right?
But when you clone it to a template, you can't edit that template.
So maybe in this situation the reason why I cloned it to a virtual machine is I
want to go in and I want to make changes.
I want to power it up.
I want to go into there.
I want to install a piece of software.
I want to uninstall some software.
I want to copy some files over to it.
I want to customize the first time you log into it, something like that.
I made some changes.
Maybe I just want to go in here, edit settings, and I'm going to add a new device.
I want to add a hard disk to it.
Let's say I want to go in.
You've got a thin provision that's just kind of unlimited on space, on my storage.
And maybe I want to also add another network card to this guy maybe, right?
Network adapter.
In reality, multi-home computers are a really bad idea, not a good practice.
But let's just say for the example, I need to connect this guy to a couple
different networks.
So I'm going to connect it to, you know, this network as well.
So I've customized this machine, you know, to the extent that I can.
I'm going to go in here and I'm going to add a new device.
So I've customized this machine, you know, to the extent that I need.
I'm going to go ahead and do a CLK to that.
And now that I've cloned this machine, I customized it over here.
Maybe I powered it on and I installed some software that I need.
All the machines that I create from this machine forward,
I need to have this software.
And I plan on making this be kind of like the gold standard
for my virtual machines going forward.
I ran Windows updates on it.
It's all current up to date.
And now I just want to save this virtual machine so that it doesn't
accidentally get changed later.
I can right-click on here and I can say templates.
And I can convert it to a template.
And really all I'm kind of doing is just changing the name of the VMX file.
So now it's a template.
And you know, like, well, if it became a template, where'd my Lab02 go?
If I go over to here, now from here I see I have my template.
You notice the icon is different from the VM versus for the template.
And now I can create all the VMs I want to from this template.
I can right-click on a template and I can say I want a new virtual
machine from this template.
We can go in, Lab03.
We'll say next.
Let's choose our compute resource.
Choose our storage.
Do we want to customize the operating system again?
In reality, we would.
Say next.
And we'll finish that.
And now we're creating a virtual machine from that template that I just
created for my VM called Lab03.
So as you can see while this is cloning,
that you can create brand-new VMs just from scratch.
All we need to do is simply go in.
We can say where we want to put them.
Right-click.
And we want to create a new virtual machine.
We can also clone existing virtual machines.
And just say we want to clone it to a virtual machine.
We can clone it straight to a template if we wanted to create a template.
And we can also create virtual machines from our existing templates.
So those are some different ways that you can create
and deploy new virtual machines in a VMware vSphere 8 environment.