Welcome back to VMware vSphere 8 in the real world. Now we're going to discuss some VM options.
So in a previous lesson, we discussed how to create new virtual machines. So now we're going
to dive a little deeper in some of the options that you have when you create a virtual machine.
So you can change the VM options either when you're creating the VM or after the VM has already
been deployed, you can go in and make changes. Some changes the VM would have to be powered off
to make those changes. Other changes you can make while the VM is up and running.
So for example, if you want to change the network, the port group that the virtual machine
adapter is connected to, you can easily make that change while the VM is running. Other changes
would depend upon the operating system. For example, are you able to hot add a CPU or hot
add RAM while the virtual machine is running? That would be dependent upon the operating system
that virtual machine is running. So you'd want to check with the vendor's documentation
and see if that vendor supports adding CPU or adding RAM. Also, most of the time, if you choose
correctly the operating system installed on the VM when you're creating that virtual machine,
then those options are going to be already set. VMware is going to know, oh, this OS does support
it, that one doesn't, and they won't let you try to add CPU to a VM that's running. If you're
running, for example, Windows 2008 or something like that, some old version of Windows or some
old version of Linux that doesn't support that feature, VMware won't let you choose that option.
If you have upgraded the VM to a newer version of Windows that does support it and you didn't
change the options of the VM, then VMware still won't let you because they don't realize you're
adding or running the newer operating system. You can go in and make those changes, though,
and change the OS options you've selected for the virtual machine.
So this basically allows you to tune the VM based upon how you need it. You can add devices,
you can remove devices. If you need another hard disk, you can go in and you can add a hard disk.
You can increase the size of a VMDK, a hard disk file. You can add another network adapter
to the machine if you need a second network adapter for some reason. So this basically
affects how the VM is going to interact with the environment that it's in, right? How it's going to
work with the host. Are you going to encrypt the VM or are you not encrypting the virtual machine?
Do you want vMotion data to be encrypted? So basically, if you're trying to move the VM from
one host to another host while the VM is running, one of the first things it does, it copies the RAM
of that VM from the old host to the new host where it's going to land. And you want that copying of
the memory to be encrypted. So you can have both the VM storage on the disk be encrypted as well as
when you migrate the data over the network is encrypted or not. Power management, you know,
how do you want the buttons when you go to, you know, put the VM to sleep or power it off,
things like that. How do you want the buttons to respond? You have security options, boot options.
You can specify when you power the VM, you want to go straight into the BIOS settings.
If, you know, so you can go there, you can make changes to that. How long do you want it to wait
to allow you to go into the BIOS before it goes in or do you want to go in straight right away?
A lot of times on a VM, you don't want to wait like a number of seconds. You want just to go
straight into the operating system. If you need to get into the BIOS for something, then you just
check the box that says, when you boot it up, take me straight into the BIOS. And then you're there.
You don't really need that pause, that delay over and over and over again, even, you know, when you're
not trying to get in there. Paravirtual PID. So this will allow you basically to use a virtual
adapter that is compatible with Fiber Channel. So you can connect to a Fiber Channel SAM from the
VM natively, you know, vCenter settings, cluster settings, resource pools, etc. So there's a bunch
of different options obviously available there. So some of the most important options that are
going to be the things that you will set most often. First thing is obviously the name of the
VM. When you're creating a new VM, location of the files, location of the VM. So you might say,
well, what's that mean? So location of the files means what datastore do you want the VM to
consider to be like, let's call it its home directory. What you can do is say, I want datastore
one, which is my middle speed, middle tier datastore. I want that to be the VM's home
directory. And by default, all the files go there. Your VMX file goes there. Your swap file goes there.
The hard disk, the VMDK files, everything goes to that datastore. What you can do then is say,
I actually want the VMDK files to go to another location. I can move the VMDK, the virtual
machine's virtual disk, to another datastore. And maybe that other datastore is more expensive,
much faster storage. So I want better performance for my VMDK files. I'm not really worried about
how fast you can read that VMX file. It's a small, you know, couple of K file. But I do want
my virtual machine's hard disk to run very quickly. And so I'm going to put those on very
fast storage. Maybe I'll put my C drive on middle fast storage, not super fast. Maybe, you know,
it's some flash storage, but the rate isn't all that high. And then I have another datastore,
another set of storage, that has faster flash disk. The rate level's higher. I have much better
performance out of this one. And that's where I'm going to put my B drive that has my SQL database
files and things like that. And I want that to be super fast. My operating system, I want to be
pretty fast. And the files that store my VMX and my swap and things, that can be just average speed,
no big deal. I'm not worried about that. So you can choose a location for all those files.
Now, the location of the VM, that would mean what clusters I want to put it in,
what host do I want to put it on, where is the compute going to come from for this,
right? I can choose, you know, things like data centers and clusters and then host individually.
So those are some pretty important options that you will consider when you're deploying a new
virtual machine. So notice here, for the guest OS family and guest OS version, those options are
grayed out. Normally grayed out means you can't change them. But what grayed out here means is
you actually can change them, but it's not exactly the same thing as if you would have chosen these
options when you created the VM. Some of the options just don't matter anymore. For example,
when you create a brand new VM, I would say, okay, my operating system's going to be Linux
and it's going to be in boom two version whatever. When you do that, then you go to the next screen
for the hardware. VMware and vCenter are going to say, okay, when you choose this operating system,
we recommend normally you have two virtual CPUs. You have one gig of RAM. I'm not sure what the
recommendations are. I'm making this up. And we think you need a hard disk size of at least
X number of gigabytes for the hard disk. If I would have chosen Windows, a Windows Server 2022,
it might have recommended more virtual CPU. It probably for sure would have recommended a lot
more RAM. And it might have recommended a larger hard disk for my C drive. So now, obviously, now
that I am changing the operating system later, I'm probably not going to go from Linux to Windows,
but maybe I'm going from Linux RHEL version 5 to RHEL version 7 or something like that.
I'm upgrading from 5 to 6 and 6 to 7 for RHEL. And so now, some of those options won't matter
because the initial what I'm first suggesting isn't going to be relevant anymore because I've
already created it and already gone past that stage. But when it says, but RHEL version 5
only supported these types of things. And now that you're going to 7, there's more new features that
are going to be available to you. So it's important to change this and make sure that VMware knows
what operating system you're running because you can say, oh, well, with version 7, you can do this.
And with version 7, you can do that. When version 5 couldn't do those things. So now with this VM,
we'll make those options available to you. So it's grayed out because not all the same
things are going to happen as if you would have chosen from the very beginning, but it's still
very important to go in and select this and make these changes. Just remember, when you see it
grayed out, you don't want to say, oh, it's grayed. I can't change it. Click on the dropdown menu.
You can actually make the change. You can save the change and it will save it and it'll be applied.
So encryption options. Do you want to encrypt this virtual machine? Do we want to encrypt
the virtual machine on disk? And do we want to encrypt the virtual machine
when it does a storage vMotion? So there are different requirements for both those things.
If we wanted to encrypt it on disk, what happens is the system's going to go in and the host is
going to say, okay, let me create a key. And with this key, I'm going to encrypt that disk.
Then that key gets encrypted. But where does the key get encrypted from? Well, if I am in a cluster,
let's say I have three or four ESXi hosts in my environment and the host goes in and it writes
the VM to disk and it encrypts it and then it stores that key. Well, the other VMs in that
cluster, they're going to need that key also. So if I have an HA event and so I need to be able to
go in and read that file, so that is the VMDK and all the virtual machine files on another host,
the other host needs to have the key to decrypt that key as well. And so what happens is it goes
in a vCenter. It's going to copy that key for that VM to all the hosts. And then all the hosts are
going to encrypt that key. But they encrypt this key, the key that is used to encrypt the disk,
so the disk encryption key, they're going to encrypt it with a key from a KMS, a key management
server. So they're going to get this key for the key management server from vCenter. So when it
says that vCenter must be trusted, it must be trusted by the key management server. So the
hosts are going to ask vCenter for this key to encrypt the key, the key encrypting key. And vCenter
with the trust relationship it has with the key management server, it gets a key from the key
management server, sends it to vCenter, vCenter can send it to the hosts, and then they can encrypt
that key and they can decrypt that key. So the disks are encrypted with a key, that key gets
encrypted with another key that is used to encrypt the virtual disk encrypting keys. And all the hosts
in a cluster, in an HA cluster, this HA cluster is the security boundary that all the VMs in there,
all the hosts in there need to be able to read all the VMs that are in there so that we can decrypt
those files and all the hosts can run them. So we need a key management server, right,
KMS server, key management server, and it needs to trust our vCenter server.
Also, do we want to encrypt vMotion traffic? So when we, again, when we vMotion a VM from one
host to another, its memory gets copied over. Once all the memory is copied over, then it copies over
all the CPU registers. Once all the CPU registers are copied over, and that's a lot smaller so it
happens really fast, then the new host can take over and start running that virtual machine.
When we copy all this data over, do we want it sent over in clear text or do we want it encrypted?
If you want it encrypted, then what happens is the two hosts that are doing this transfer,
they create session keys for this encryption time. We don't need a key management server. We're not
saving these keys. This key is only used for copying the VM from one host to the other.
Once that copy is done, that key is thrown away and it's not used again. So we don't need to worry
about going to a key management server and having it saved and all this stuff. It's just a real
quick session key. It's a 256-bit key that the two hosts agree on that we then use to copy that
machine over. vMotion encryption can be disabled. It can be opportunistic, and what opportunistic
means is if both hosts support it and they can do it, then we'll encrypt it. If it doesn't support,
if one doesn't support it, then we'll do it in clear text. So the options can be we don't need
to waste overhead. We don't need to waste CPU trying to encrypt this VM. The data on it isn't
that important. Hopefully that's not really ever an option. Opportunistic means if we can do it,
we will. If we can't, we'll do the vMotion anyway. Also, hopefully that's not really an option.
Required means if I can't do a secure encrypted transfer from the source host to the destination,
vMotion is going to fail. It'll tell me that there's a compatibility issue and I can't
move that host or the VM from this host to that host. I'd have to choose a different
host where the vMotion traffic can be encrypted. So that's what the different options are for
encrypted vMotion. So here we're just seeing vMotion enabled. Do we want to allow it, not
allow it? Opportunistic. And then encrypt fault tolerant. So we also, do we want to have fault
tolerant VMs? Again, fault tolerant VMs are where I have a VM running on one host and I have a copy
of it running on another, but the other one's a slave. All the work, everything's happening,
all the memory changes, all the CPU changes, everything's happening on a source host. And
then all those changes get copied to that slave machine, that copy of it. So if the source one
were to fail, then the one that's the copy, that's not doing any of the work, that one takes
over and starts doing all the work. And this happens like in a second. It happens super fast.
So if we have critical applications we can't have go down, we can create a fault tolerant VM,
whereas HA would maybe take a few minutes to get up and going again by having to restart it
someplace else. Fault tolerant takes over right away. The users won't even see a blip. All right.
So we can also say, do you want that fault tolerant information that's being exchanged
to be encrypted or not? So power management. So how does the guest OS respond to be put into
standby? That's an option. How does it respond for suspend mode? Do we want to leave it on?
How do we want to do suspension? So if we say we want to put the guest machine in
standby mode, either the hypervisor can just pause the virtual machine's processing and the
hypervisor can write the virtual machine's memory to a file that it controls. The virtual machine
itself has no idea that what's happening to it. And when it wakes back up again, all that it will
know is the clocks jump forward a bunch of times. But the virtual machine is completely out of the
loop. So if you have a virtual machine that does not support suspend mode, or if you don't have
VMware tools installed and you can't pass the suspend command to it, then the host can do it
for you. But what can also happen is we can actually tell the guest OS, you go into standby
mode. You go ahead and put yourself to sleep. So it will go in and it will write its memory
within a file on the VMDK file and the guest OS quietly shuts itself down. And then when you go
and you say the power back on again, it takes itself out of standby mode. So do you want the
hypervisor to do it or do you want the guest OS to do it? Most of the time you'd rather let the
guest OS know as much about what's going on as possible. We don't want to necessarily have the
guest OS be oblivious to what's happening, if possible. All right. Wake on LAN, do we want to
have wake on LAN enabled for a virtual machine? So we need to select the adapter, enable that or
not enable that option. So here we can see our standby mode responses. Again, we can suspend
the virtual machine or have the guest OS put it into suspend mode. Wake on LAN, we can check that
box if we want to enable wake on LAN or not for a virtual adapter. All the showing here means
basically you can see it's the exact same set of options and all that, just the layout's gotten a
little different. So next four are some key options, VMware tool power controls. So shutdown
versus the power off. So when we hit that red box, do we want to send that shutdown command
to the guest OS or would you want it to just power off the VM? You probably want the guest OS to do a
nice orderly shutdown versus just being powered off as if you pulled the power cord out of the
wall. Suspend versus suspend guest, we kind of just discussed that option. So do you want the
hypervisor to suspend the VM and it's unaware or do we want a suspend command sent to the virtual
machine's operating system and it goes through and does a suspend for us, right? Guest OS restart
versus a reset. So a reset would be kind of like you hit the power button on the front of your
computer for a moment and it just power cycles that computer real quick versus shutting it down.
Whereas the guest OS restart means it goes through and it actually does a reboot. Again, it's always
better if you can get the guest OS to participate in whatever command you're trying to execute
versus just brutally pulling power cords out of walls or hitting power buttons in front of
computers. It's better if the guest OS can participate. Now if the machine's frozen and it
can't, you've got to do what you got to do. But if you can get the guest OS to reboot or if you can
get the guest OS to suspend or to power down, things like that, that's always an option
preferred. You do need the VMware tool to be installed. You want the current version of VMware
tools on the VM for things like this. Another option for our VM is when you go in, you want to
have the current version of VMware tools. That's always super important. So you might go to a
virtual machine and you might see it say in the banner in the vSphere web client that your virtual
machine tools, VMware tools are out of date and you'll be tempted to right then, oh yes, update
these really quick. Remember, upgrading VMware tools requires a restart. So you don't want the
tools upgraded and the VM not able to restart. So now we're in this limbo mode of VMware tools.
So you want to schedule that at a time when you know that you can have a maintenance window.
So then we can upgrade the VMware tools, reboot the virtual machine, have it come back up again.
Everything's good. Now when you install VMware tools, you're going to be installing new device
drivers, right? New versions of device drivers on that virtual machine. And so you might also want
to, before you install the VMware tools, the new version, snapshot the VM, then upgrade the VMware
tools, reboot it, it comes back up, everything's good, I'm not getting any errors or anything,
and then delete your snapshot. If something goes wrong and it doesn't want to reboot correctly,
revert back your snapshot to the old version, bring it up, look and see what's going on. Okay,
let's start troubleshooting that and see why that happened, okay? And then scripts. You want to run
scripts. You want to run scripts when the machine powers on. You want to run scripts when the machine
powers off. There's a bunch of options for that, right? So here we're seeing power options. What
do you want to do when you hit the red box? Do you want to shut down or do you want to power it off,
things like that? The big thing is the bottom there, running the scripts. So you want to do
it at power on, you want to do it after resuming. So if you have suspended it and you resumed it,
you want to run scripts at that time before suspend or before shutting down the guest OS. So
you can choose all of them or you can choose any combination of those options there.
So virtualization-based security. So additional security for the virtual machine, you need the
latest versions of Windows to support this. And basically what this is going to do, you also need
to have EFI enabled and basically it will allow for additional level security between the hypervisor
and the operating system for things like a TPM and TPM2 and just basically overall security for
the virtual machine to make it so executables aren't going to be ran, that shouldn't be around
on the machine. It just makes it a much more secure environment. It does give you secure boot.
With secure boot is basically the operating system itself is signed with a certificate
and that certificate is on the motherboard. So it says, does this certificate on my motherboard
match the certificate that's on the operating system? You know, the signing of it, this file
is encrypted, I can decrypt it and read it. Yep, we've got a good operating system. We trust this
OS to not have been compromised and we trust the vendor of it, things like that. So that's
virtualization-based security. So some boot options, EFI. So if we want to use a virtualization-based
security, we need to have EFI. We also have BIOS options available. So BIOS might be, you know,
useful if we have some really old operating systems and we're trying to boot that doesn't
support EFI. Boot delay, you can specify a boot delay when you power it on so you can hit, you
know, Dell and get into the BIOS. There's also an option, you can just check a box that says,
next time I reboot this machine, take me into the BIOS. You probably don't want to choose that
boot delay option very often because you don't want the machine always delaying every time you
do a reboot for a few seconds. You want it back up and going as fast as possible and you rarely go
into the BIOS. So for those rare occasions you do, just choose the box that takes you into the BIOS.
What happens if I fail to boot? Okay, that's another thing you want to consider. So if we
look over here, we see we can choose what firmware. EFI, BIOS is also an option. Do we
want to enable secure boot? If your OS does not support secure boot and you check this box, it
won't boot. So make sure you have an OS that supports secure boot like all the current versions
of Windows do. A boot delay option is there. You can specify that in, you know, a number of
milliseconds. Forced EFI setup, so it's basically forced if you want to go into the EFI settings
when it comes back up again. And if I fail to boot recovery, how long do I wait before I try again?
You want to set this option to, you know, to be a reasonable number. You don't want to be hours.
You don't want to be a single second. So, okay, failed to boot. Let's try this again. And honestly,
usually, if it fails to boot the first time, it's going to fail to boot the second, third,
and fourth, too. So you may not want it to try and reboot on a failure to boot. You might want
just to wait so you can go in there and start troubleshooting and figure out why.
So secure boot makes it the hardware-only boot using pre-approved software, meaning a
pre-approved operating system. It's a certificate that's created by Microsoft, but if you are a
Linux distributor, you can get that certificate. You know, different OSes can get that certificate.
They can also do a secure boot. Trusted by the manufacturer, basically the hardware manufacturer
of that motherboard. We can also say on a virtual environment, then, of course,
it's going to be trusted by, you know, the certificate that's on the VMware system.
VMs can be enabled or disabled using secure boot, right? So EFI is a firmware, right? So we used to
be always with BIOS. Now we have EFI. Different vendors have different implementations of this
EFI. You see different options in there. Some of the cool things about it, if you're used to the
old BIOS, everything was done through tab and arrows and things like that. Now with EFI, you can
use, you know, your mouse. You can point around in there and click on boxes and things like that.
So from a use perspective, it's easier, but it gives you a lot more security features, too.
Like, for example, secure boot is one of our options, right? You do need to have virtual
hardware version 13 or later, right? So you're not going to, you know, do this with some older
versions of ESX, like, you know, 5.5 or something like that. You need a current version of VMware
support, at least version 13 of hardware. And the OS needs to have UEFI secure boot support,
meaning it needs to basically have encryption, kind of a certificate that is by a trusted vendor,
and that vendor happens to be Microsoft. So to enable or disable secure boot, you can see
your options in here, right? You're going to navigate to the virtual machine, select it,
you know, edit and go to settings. Then you're going to expand the secure boot options.
You can say you want to verify the EFI options in there. You can check the box or uncheck the
box to enable secure boot, if you want to enable secure boot or not. And then you can go in there
and you can say, okay, and that basically enables the settings. So really, it's a matter of going
in and choosing EFI for your BIOS and checking the box for secure boot, really is what all those
steps are saying. Fiber channel MPIV. So what you can do with this is we can actually give a virtual
machine an adapter that is going to be a fiber channel adapter. So what MPIV is, it allows a
physical fiber channel HBA to have multiple worldwide names, so that I can then give a
virtual machine fiber channel adapter with its own unique worldwide name, and that will go through
my physical fiber channel adapter that has its own worldwide name that the ESXi host is using,
but the virtual machine's traffic can just slip right through there and connect to the SAN,
and the SAN isn't going to see the ESXi host, it's going to see the Windows VM or the Linux
VM or whatever it is that's using this virtualized fiber channel adapter. So now my virtual machine
can see my fiber channel storage. There aren't tons of scenarios where it's important that the
VM can see my SAN storage natively, but if you have a scenario where you have an application
or some kind of a use where you want the VM to see the fiber channel storage natively,
you can do this with this fiber channel MPIV so that it will allow the physical, and of course,
the adapter has to support it, the host, the ESXi host supports it. The adapter can actually have
multiple virtual worldwide names, and the reason why it has multiple is because it has its own,
and the VMs going through it also can have their unique own. That's not saying that every VM is
going to. You'd have to configure it. Most of the time, the storage only sees the ESXi host talking
to it, and the VMs are talking, you know, communicating through the virtualization
that I need to write to a disk. The hypervisor translates that, sends it through the HBA,
and again, the SAN just thinks it's talking to the ESXi host. This would be a unique situation
where you've decided to configure a VM to also have a unique worldwide name and a fiber channel
virtualized adapter. So, this is a screenshot of what the MPIV would look like, right? So,
you just have some options here for configuring that. If you want to create a new worldwide name,
are we going to remove the worldwide name assignment on there? Okay, what are we going
to do with all those settings? So, basically, we're just going through and configuring a virtual
fiber channel adapter on a virtual machine. So, here in this demo environment, this is
VMware's hands-on lab environment. So, it's hol.vmware.com that we're working in, and we're
just working on the virtualization 101 lab. So, in here, we can look at, like, I created this demo
VM1 here. This is not part of the VMware's normal environment. So, let's go ahead and right-click
on this guy, and let's go to edit settings. And from here, we can change the different settings
in here. So, for example, this was the tiny Linux machine that I cloned. And so, it has one virtual
CPU and 256 gigs of RAM. I can go in. I can change the number of virtual CPUs that are in here,
right? We have some other options for, like, are we going to allow hot plug or not? Are we going
to set reservations and limits, which we'll discuss all that later. Here, I can change the
memory. Right now, I have 256 megabytes, which is basically a quarter of a gig. I could change
this to one gigabyte from here. And, you know, we could start this up. We have our virtual hard
disk. We can go in there and change the size. One thing we can do also is if we were, say,
going to add a new virtual device, we can go in. So, we want to add a hard disk.
And here's our new hard disk. And how big do we want to make that hard drive? And we can say,
okay, we're going to make this hard drive one gig. Now, if I made it too big, let's say I wanted to
go in there and make it 100 gigs, we'll see we don't have capacity for a 100-gig virtual disk.
So, what I can do if I needed that is I can go in and instead of being thick provisioned,
I can thin provision it. And that will allow me to create the virtual disk, start it up,
thin provisioned. And then later, if I add more space to my storage,
I can then let it grow to the entire 100 gigs. Right now, if we were trying to exceed the 64.29
gigs, it would actually end up crashing the VM because we wouldn't have enough space to grow
the virtual disk to that size. But one way we're going to round that limited space where it was
a temporary situation where we just need to add more storage and maybe it's on order or something
like that, we can just go there and we can thin provision that. We can also say, yeah, but I don't
need all these different devices. Like, for example, maybe I don't need that CD-ROM drive
on here or on a Windows system. A lot of times our Windows systems will have USB devices. So,
we can say a host USB device. Oh, I haven't added. I don't want a host device. A host device means
I'm actually borrowing one that's actually physically on the host, right? I don't want
to do that. I just want to add a USB controller. So, if this was a new VM I was creating and like,
oh, well, I don't need any USB devices on here. I don't need this or that. I can just go in and
say I want to go and remove all the USB controllers because I'm not going to use any USB devices with
this. No USB mice and keyboards and miles, that kind of stuff. Now, what will happen sometimes
if you have to remove all the USB virtual controllers is sometimes the virtual mice
don't work because there's, you know, virtualized USB mice instead of the old-fashioned PS2 or
serial and things like that. So, you actually sometimes will want that. Another common thing
that you will see, and not a lot, but sometimes we'll need more than one virtual network
on a virtual machine. So, you'll say add a virtual device, add the adapter,
and then I'll go in and say, okay, I want this guy to be my VMXNet3. I've installed VMware tools
on this virtual machine, and because I've installed VMware tools, that VMXNet3 adapter
is going to work just fine for me, but I want it connected to a different port group. And I can go
through and say, okay, I want it connected to this port group, for example. So, now I have multiple
virtual adapters. I have configured my hard disk. I have maybe customized the number of virtual
CPUs, the amount of RAM that this system is going to run on, the CD-ROM drive.
Am I going to go in and say I want this connected to the client device, meaning
I want to connect it to the client that's connecting to manage this vCenter environment
to its CD-ROM drive? The most common thing you'll do is either an ISO, sometimes host device,
meaning the ESXi host CD-ROM drive, whatever ISO or whatever CD is in there, most common
is going to be this guy here. You're going to connect to an ISO in a data store.
In this HOL environment, the hands-on lab environment, we don't have any ISOs,
but normally I would check on that, and then I would browse to whatever data store,
add my ISOs, and select it, and then it shows connected there. And then the next thing is,
do you want to do connect the power on? Oftentimes, if you're going to be installing
an operating system, you want to check that box, and then after you're done installing,
you're going to uncheck the connect the power on, and you're going to uncheck the connected.
You don't want that on there after that. I'm going to go ahead and put it back at
client device for right now because I don't have an ISO to map to it.
Video card, you can specify some video card specifications. This used to be
a pretty generic, simple thing, but now we can set a number of devices. I want one monitor or
I want two monitors. How much video memory do you want to dedicate? The more monitors and more RAM
than the higher resolutions and things like that, you can more easily support. All right.
So, those are some of the generic settings you can go there and set on the virtual machine like that.
When you're creating a new VM, one interesting thing, I can say I want to add a new virtual
machine. I'm going to say create a virtual machine here. I'm going to go ahead and call this
and I'll say next, and I'm going to choose my compute resource of this host.
Next. I'll choose some storage. I'll say next. Now this, okay, the ESXi version I want to be
compatible with, if all my hosts are eight or going to be newer, I can choose eight. If some
of my hosts are going to be 7.0 update two or newer, then I would select that, but we'll just
leave it at eight. Say next. Now the guest operating system, this is interesting because what you'll see
is it's going to tell VMware, one, what features this VM can support because VMs that are running
Windows, the version of Windows Server 2022 will have features that VMs running Windows Server 2012
don't have, right? So, different versions of operating systems support things like hot add
CPU or hot add memory where other older versions may not or certain versions of Linux may not.
Another thing that this will do is let's go ahead and just say we're going to do Windows
Server 2022 and say next. And notice that I have two virtual CPUs, four gigs of RAM,
and it wants to give me a, you know, saying here a 90 gig hard drive, but it can't support that
because there's not enough free space. So, I'd have to go in there and say, okay, do this, but
we want a thin provisioner, right? What I can also do is let's say instead I'm going to install a
version of Linux and the version of Linux I want to install, Alma Linux works just fine for this.
I'll say next. This only needs one virtual CPU, two gigs of RAM, and 16 gigs of hard disk space.
So, it knows based upon the operating system, here's kind of the minimum recommended
requirements for this particular guest operating system. If I go back and instead of Alma,
I choose Photon, Veeam or Photon OS, and say next. Now, I only need 16 gigs of hard drive,
one virtual CPU, two gigs of RAM. So, depending upon what operating system you choose,
there's different options or different default settings that it will select for you.
So, it doesn't really matter for this right now. We're just going to say any. We've already been
through this before in another demo where we went through and customized all the different things,
and it's just similar to when we right-clicked on an existing computer and said edit.
I wanted to show you that based upon this OS family and the version, you'll get different
options and different default settings for your customization. Besides that, it also tells
a hypervisor what features that this VM is going to support. Now, if we go to our demo
virtual machine here, and we go back to edit settings, go to VM options.
All right. So, under our general options here, right, we have the name. Notice the guest OS family
and the guest OS version. These are grayed out. And generally, grayed out will tell us,
oh, we can't change that. But actually, I can go in and change this and say, actually,
I'm going to be running. Let's see here. Doesn't really matter too much.
I'll just say a version of Ubuntu. I'm going to be running Ubuntu. All right. So, obviously,
the default settings don't change because that's already said and done. We've already created a
virtual machine. But it might say the version of Linux I had selected before I know only supports
these features. And this new version I know supports additional features or fewer features.
So, it's grayed out, which normally, like I said, means we can't change these. But we can.
It's just grayed out to let you know that not everything that would normally be changed is
going to be changed by selecting this. Okay. And here's where we can go in and do things
like encryption. Do we want to enable encryption for vMotion, fault-tolerant VMs? Remember,
opportunistic means if both hosts support it, I'll do it. But if one doesn't, one doesn't,
I'll still do the vMotion anyway. I just won't do it encrypted. If both sides support the
encryption, I'll do it encrypted. All right. And that's what the opportunistic means. I can disable
it, which means I'll never use encryption. Or I can say it's required. Required would mean
both sides have to support it or the vMotion is going to fail. All right. Some options there.
VMware tools. What do you want to have happen? You know, for example, if I hit this little,
you know, shutdown button, by default, it shuts down the guest OS. It sends a signal to the guest
operating system to shut down. I can say if I hit that button, just power it off. I just basically
yank the power cord out of the back of the system. What happens if I hit the little pause icon?
It can suspend or it can suspend the guest, meaning it sends a suspend signal to the guest
operating system. And what happens if we hit this little, you know, restart symbol? We can say
restart or restart the guest, meaning it will send a signal to the operating system saying to
reboot the operating system, whereas this other option, which doesn't say guest, that is going to
be basically like resetting the hardware, the actual, you know, workstation or server itself,
and power cycle it without letting the operating system know it's going to happen. So, you might
end up getting some correction or something like that on there if you do that. All right.
VMware tools, you want to check and upgrade VMware tools before each power on.
Normally, you don't want to automatically upgrade to VMware tools. You want to schedule that.
Time synchronization, you want to start a synchronized startup and every time you resume.
Run VMware tool scripts, you want to run after a power on, when resuming, before suspending. We've
been through all these options here. Your boot options, this is where you're going to go in,
and we talked about, you want to force a BIOS setup. So, next time I turn this computer on,
if I check this box, it'll go right into the BIOS, right? If it fails to boot, what do we
want to do? We want to try Albergan automatically after so many seconds have passed, right? How
many seconds we want that to be. You can set some of those options there. Power management.
So, how should the virtual machine respond when the guest OS is placed in standby? Do you want to
suspend the virtual machine or put the guest OS in standby, right, but leave the machine powered on?
Some of our advanced options.
This is disabled acceleration or enable logging, right? Enable logging means you'll get,
obviously, some logs you have to set up the startup and running the VM.
Debugging and statistics. You can say how much detail you want to get in there, right?
Where do you want your swap file? The default location of the swap file means wherever the
virtual machine is stored, that's where you're going to store the swap file as well, right?
You can say you want the virtual machine directory or if a cluster has settings. So,
I can go to the cluster and put a swap file location, and normally the cluster is set to
with the virtual machine. So, the default cluster setting is with the virtual machine,
but the VM setting says whatever the cluster says. The cluster could say one thing, though,
you can go in and do something different. You could go in and say, I know the VM is stored
on this certain data store, but I want to store a swap file onto a different data store, right?
So, maybe it has this really cheap storage that I want the swap file location to be on because swap
files can just get really big and kind of carried away. Your swap files can be equal to the amount
of RAM in the virtual machine, unless you have a reservation, then it's set equal to the size
of your reservation. All right. So, the Fiber Channel MPIV, if you're setting up MPIV for
Fiber Channel for your VM, as we discussed, CPU topology, right? CPU topology available
for virtual machines that are eight or later, which I believe we did choose that. Oh, actually,
we cloned that machine over there. So, we created a new machine, we could set the CPU topology.
This one here might be an older VM from an older version of VMware. All right. So, this is editing
the settings on a virtual machine that already exists, and we walk through
editing the settings of a VM that we are creating brand new from scratch. So, you can either edit
the settings of a VM as you're creating it to be the non-standard default. You can also go in and
edit the settings of a VM after it's been created. Now, when it's powered off, like this one,
you can change pretty much everything. Once they are powered on, there will be certain things you
can and cannot change. You're not going to be able to remove a disk controller and things like that,
or certain items you're not going to be able to remove. Like most operating systems, I'm not
going to let you remove CPUs when it's powered on, you have to shut it down to do that. So,
that is virtual machine settings.