Check the compatibility of any third party products and plugins that might be used for backups, anti-virus, monitoring, etc.The ESXi host and all vSphere components should be configured to use Network Time Protocol (NTP), the installation can fail or the vpxd service may not be able to start if the clocks are not synchronised. If you are deploying to an ESXi host the host must not be in maintenance mode or lockdown mode.There is no direct upgrade path for hosts running ESXi v5.5 or 6.0 to v7.0. vCenter Server 7.0 can only be deployed to, and manage, ESXi hosts v6.5 or later.Before beginning the installation Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) resolution should be in place with forward and reverse DNS A records added, and replicated if applicable, for the vCenter Server hostname.The vSphere download packages available from my. System Requirements Make sure you review the release notes with your download before starting, in this example I am using vCenter Server 7.0 Update 1c. For multiple or repeated installations in large environments the vCenter Server Appliance and configuration can also be silently deployed using CLI and JSON file. The target host or vCenter must be running vSphere version 6.5 or later. The installer must be run from a machine with network connectivity to the ESXi host or vCenter Server where the new appliance will be deployed.
The vCenter Server installation bundle comes as an ISO file mountable on a Windows, Linux, or Mac device. The installer file for vSphere can be downloaded here, a 60 day evaluation period is automatically applied. You can find more information on the full list of services in detail from the vCenter Server Installation and Setup documentation. The VCSA is an optimised virtual appliance running Photon OS 3.0, and contains all the vCenter required services, such as SSO, Certificate Authority, PostgreSQL, Lifecycle Manager, etc. A migration path from Windows vCenter Servers 6.5 and 6.7 to VCSA 7.0 is available. The external Platform Services Controller (PSC) deployment model available in versions 6.0 and 6.5 has been removed, only the embedded option is offered in vSphere 7.įurthermore, running vCenter Server on Windows has finally been deprecated, and all deployments must now use the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA). Several design decisions have been removed in vSphere 7 as component topology and lifecycle management have been drastically simplified. If you’re looking for more information on running a vSphere lab on the Intel NUC range check out the VMware Homelab section of, which has some great guides and resources. In this example vCenter Server will be deployed in a lab environment to an Intel NUC Bean Canyon running ESXi 7.0 U1C. To read about what’s new in vSphere 7 see vSphere 7 and vSAN 7 Headline New Features. vCenter Server then provides the single management pane for physical hosts and virtual machines, along with enterprise functionality like vMotion for live workload portability, High Availability for workload failover, and Distributed Resource Scheduler for automatically balancing resources. ESXi needs to be installed first on a physical machine to provide at least one host for the vCenter virtual appliance to be deployed to. You can track the latest releases and build numbers in this KB article.ĮSXi is the market leading hypervisor, able to abstract and pool compute resources across commodity hardware, and implement granular based controls and automation. The current version at the time of writing is vSphere 7.0 Update 1c. vSphere 7.0 was initially released in June 2020, and followed up with vSphere 7.0 Update 1 in October 2020. This opening post in a new lab series provides a walkthrough for installing the latest iteration of vSphere 7.0 bringing cloud-native workloads to the data centre with embedded Kubernetes and Tanzu.