ESXi 6.5 Installation Step by Step

ESXi Hardware Requirements

Make sure the host meets the minimum hardware configurations supported by ESXi6.5.

Hardware and System Resources

To install or upgrade ESXi, your hardware and system resources must meet the following requirements:

■	Supported server platform . For a list of supported platforms, see the VMware Compatibility Guide at http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility.
■	ESXi 6.5 requires a host machine with at least two CPU cores.
■	ESXi 6.5 supports 64-bit x86 processors released after September 2006. This includes a broad range of multi-core processors. For a complete list of supported processors, see the VMware compatibility guide at http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility.
■	ESXi 6.5 requires the NX/XD bit to be enabled for the CPU in the BIOS.
■	ESXi 6.5 requires a minimum of 4GB of physical RAM. It is recommended to provide at least 8 GB of RAM to run virtual machines in typical production environments.
■	To support 64-bit virtual machines, support for hardware virtualization (Intel VT-x or AMD RVI) must be enabled on x64 CPUs.
■	One or more Gigabit or faster Ethernet controllers. For a list of supported network adapter models, see the VMware Compatibility Guide athttp://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility.
■	SCSI disk or a local, non-network, RAID LUN with unpartitioned space for the virtual machines.
■	For Serial ATA (SATA), a disk connected through supported SAS controllers or supported on-board SATA controllers. SATA disks will be considered remote, not local. These disks will not be used as a scratch partition by default because they are seen as remote. Note You cannot connect a SATA CD-ROM device to a virtual machine on an ESXi 6.5 host. To use the SATA CD-ROM device, you must use IDE emulation mode. Storage Systems For a list of supported storage systems, see the VMware Compatibility Guide at http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility. For Software Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), see Installing and Booting ESXi with Software FCoE. ESXi Booting Requirements vSphere 6.5 supports booting ESXi hosts from the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). With UEFI, you can boot systems from hard drives, CD-ROM drives, or USB media. Starting with vSphere 6.5, VMware Auto Deploy supports network booting and provisioning of ESXi hosts with UEFI. ESXi can boot from a disk larger than 2TB provided that the system firmware and the firmware on any add-in card that you are using support it. See the vendor documentation. Note Changing the boot type from legacy BIOS to UEFI after you install ESXi 6.5 might cause the host to fail to boot. In this case, the host displays an error message similar to Not a VMware boot bank. Changing the host boot type between legacy BIOS and UEFI is not supported after you install ESXi 6.5. Storage Requirements for ESXi 6.5 Installation or Upgrade Installing ESXi 6.5 or upgrading to ESXi 6.5 requires a boot device that is a minimum of 1GB in size. When booting from a local disk, SAN or iSCSI LUN, a 5.2GB disk is required to allow for the creation of the VMFS volume and a 4GB scratch partition on the boot device . If a smaller disk or LUN is used, the installer attempts to allocate a scratch region on a separate local disk. If a local disk cannot be found the scratch partition, /scratch, is located on the ESXi host ramdisk, linked to/tmp/scratch. You can reconfigure /scratch to use a separate disk or LUN. For best performance and memory optimization, do not leave /scratch on the ESXi host ramdisk. To reconfigure /scratch, see the topic "Set the Scratch Partition from the vSphere Web Client" in the vSphere Installation and Setup documentation. Due to the I/O sensitivity of USB and SD devices the installer does not create a scratch partition on these devices. When installing or upgrading on USB or SD devices, the installer attempts to allocate a scratch region on an available local disk or datastore. If no local disk or datastore is found, /scratch is placed on the ramdisk. After the installation or upgrade, you should reconfigure /scratch to use a persistent datastore. Although a 1GB USB or SD device suffices for a minimal installation, you should use a 4GB or larger device. The extra space will be used for an expanded coredump partition on the USB/SD device. Use a high quality USB flash drive of 16GB or larger so that the extra flash cells can prolong the life of the boot media, but high quality drives of 4GB or larger are sufficient to hold the extended coredump partition. See Knowledge Base article http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2004784. For the Complete list of requirements refer vSphere Installation and Setup Guide  Steps to Install ESXi 6.5 1. Boot your physical machine with ESXi 6.5 Installation Media that can be downloaded from here 2. Once machine is booted with ESXi 6.5 Media, It will start loading the drivers like other operating systems installation do 3. Once drivers are loaded you will be get the welcome message > Hit Enter to Continue 4. Press F11 to accept the License Agreement 5. Select disk for ESXi Installation and then hit Enter to Continue 6. Select Keyboard Layout specific to your Country and Hit Enter to Continue 7. Enter Password for root user account (minimum 7 characters password is needed) and then hit enter to continue 8.  You may get the Errors or Warnings like in my case warning message was related to Hardware Virtualization as this is needed for running VMs with 64 bit Guest operating system, hit Enter to continue 9. Press F11 to start the installation 10. Installation is started now, wait till it gets completed 11. Once Installation is completed you will get message to reboot your server, hit Enter to reboot. 12. Once booted you will get DCUI, Login and then configure network details for your ESXi (IP address, Subnet Mask, Default Gateway & DNS). Now your host is ready, use any VMware Client to manage your ESXi Host.