Creating a Virtual Machine.doc

Performance Support

Virtualization: Creating a Virtual Machine Transcript We're using the vSphere Client from VMware to connect to a physical machine where we’ve installed VMware ESX. In order to create a virtual machine, once we open the vSphere Client, you can rightclick on the ESX machine where you’d like to create your virtual machine and select the option for New Virtual Machine. The wizard will open and we’ll be presented with a number of options ‒ the configuration between Typical and Custom. In most cases, we’ll select the Typical installation, and we can edit the settings later. Click Next. At this point, we name our virtual machine. Now here you can either name the virtual machine to match what the operating system itself will be called later, or you can use a different virtual machine name. In our case, we’re going to call it VM Number 2 ‒ although in a production environment you would probably never use a name like that. The next step in the VM creation process is to select the Datastore where you’d like the VM to reside. That's basically where on the physical storage do you want your VM to be. For our example, we only have one selection. The next step is to tell the virtual machine software what operating system you're going to install on the VM once it's created. There are choices for Microsoft Windows, Linux, Novell, Solaris and Other. For the Windows machines...when we select the drop-down, you can see that there's a large number of different operating systems from the Windows platform that you can select. For our example, we’ll select Windows XP and click Next. The next option is to create the virtual disk. How big do we want it to be? It gives us an option for increasing or decreasing the size. We’ll create a virtual machine with a hard disk of 40 GB. There are also options to commit the space on demand called Thin Provisioning where the actual hard drive would be created at a smaller size and then grow as required. We’re not going to select that for our example. Once the virtual machine creation wizard is complete you have the option to click Finish and the process is done. Or we can select Edit the virtual machine settings before completion. There is a checkbox here, and then click Continue. What we've done by doing that is we've enabled ourselves an opportunity to look at exactly what the virtual machine will consist of ‒ and we can change any of the settings by increasing or decreasing resources, or even potentially adding or removing brand-new resources. For our example, let's increase the amount of memory that the virtual machine will have from 256 to 512, and then create the machine with 2 vCPUs instead of one. Let's double-check the network settings to make sure that it's going to be connected when the machine powers on and make sure that it's connected to the right network when the machine is created. I’m going to click Finish...let the configuration wizard complete. Now that the virtual machine is created, I can see that I made a typo. I'm just going to right-click on the virtual machine, click Edit Settings, click the center tab for Options, and then fix my typo and commit the change.

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