Remote Infrastructure Management: VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5 Installation (Step By Step)

What’s New with vSphere 6.5

vCenter Server Appliance:

Fully Integrated vSphere Update Manager with vCenter Server appliance (No more windows)
File based backup/restore for vCSA
Native High Availability for the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA only)
Builtin monitoring web interface for the VCSA
over 2x increase in scale and 3x in performance
Easy to migrate from Windows vCenter to VCSA 6.5 using vCenter Server Appliance tool
vCenter Server appliance runs on Photon OS now.
Client Integration Plugin (CIP) for the vSphere Web Client is no longer required anymore
Run the VCSA depolyment installeren on Windows, Mac and Linux
The installer now supports install, upgrade, migrate and restore
HTML 5 based vSphere Client

Resource Management – HA, FT and DRS

High Availability:

Improved Admission Control Policies :
VM Restart Priorities: new restart priorities added such as highest and lowest in addition to High, medium, low which available from previous versions.
HA Orchestrated Restart: Enforce VM to VM dependency chains. This is great for multi-tier applications the require VMs to restart in a particular order. (DB, App and then Web Vm)
Proactive HA: vCenter plugin that connects to the hardware vendor monitoring solution (Dell Open Manage, HP Insight Manager or Cisco UCS). When there is for example a memory failure detected by the hardware vendor monitoring tools, the VMs from that hosts are migrated using vMotion to another hosts.

vSphere DRS:

Network-Aware DRS :Adds network bandwidth calculations in DRS. This avoids an over-subscribing host network link.
Advanced DRS Policies exposed in the UI.

Fault Tolerance:

Improved DRS integration: DRS performs the better placement of the secondary VM
Performance Improvements:Host level network latency reduction. Allows to run more applications with FT.
Multi-NIC Aggregation: It is possible to pack more NICs like (vMotion for FT) for better performance.

Content Library:

Mount an ISO from the Content Library
Customize OS during VM deployments from the library.
Update an existing template with a new version
Optimized HTTP sync between vCenter Servers

Virtual SAN 6.5:

Virtual SAN iSCSI access: iSCSI access is built for supporting MSCS with shared storage and physical workloads that needs to have storage. There is no support in this release to targeting the VSAN storage to other ESXi clusters.
2-node Direct Connect and Witness traffic separation: Ability to connect two nodes directly using ethernet cables. Stretchen VSAN with Direct Connect is not supported at the moment.
Licensing: The VSAN standard license includes the All-Flash option and New VSAN advanced for ROBO licensing

Security:

VM-level disk encryption capability designed to protect against unauthorized data access.
Encrypted vMotion capability, vSphere can safeguard both data at-rest and data in-motion.
Secure boot model to protect both the hypervisor and the guest operating system.
Audit-quality logging capabilities that provide more forensic information about user actions.

Installation Steps:

Download the Source ISO from Vmware Downloads.

Burn to CD/DVD.

Boot from the CD/DVD.

Now ESXi booted, and loaded the modules.

NFS4 Client module is loaded successfully.

Scanning the available devices (Local and VSAN).

Discover the storage devices and then select the device to install the ESi 6.5.

Select the key board layout.

Set the admin user root password.

Press F11 to install.

Now installation starts and installs all required packages.

After successful installation, it will ask you to reboot.

Now booted with esxi 6.5 with DHCP IP Address.

To get the DCUI (Direct Console User Interface) press F2.

The Direct Console User Interface (DCUI) allows you to interact with the host locally using text-based menus. You can use the Direct Console User Interface to enable local and remote access to the ESXi Shell.