Planning and Installing VMware ESXi
Nicholas Marshall, Mike Brown, G. Blair Fritz, Ryan Johnson · 2018
This chapter helps administrators to understand ESXi architecture, work with ESXi compatibility requirements, plan an ESXi deployment, deploy ESXi, perform post-installation configuration of ESXi, and use the vSphere Host Client. ESXi, as a piece of software, is quite small in comparison to the average size of most software, weighing in at just a few hundred megabytes. Deploying VMware vSphere is more than just virtualizing servers. Storage, networking, and security in a vSphere deployment are equally as significant as they are with the physical servers. There are three options for deploying VMware ESXi: interactive installation of ESXi, unattended (scripted) installation of ESXi, and automated provisioning of ESXi. After the installation of ESXi or during an unattended installation of ESXi using an installation script, the host should be configured to perform time synchronization with a reliable time source.