Creating a New Virtual Machine on VMware 5.0

Today we will go through the process of creating a new virtual machine on the new VMware 5.0 infrastructure.  I wont go into the process of installing the host and connecting to it with vSphere, but that's pretty straight forward.

I will just expand on the parts that are different from VMware 4.X.(not much!)

Step 1: right click on the host, and choose "New Virtual Machine"

Step 2: Choose it Typical or Custom

 

Step 3:Choose a name for your VM

Step 4:  Choose a datastore (in the case here of our test server, there is only one datastore configured)

Step 5: Choose Guest Operating System

Step 6: Choose network connections

Step 7: Choose virtual disk size and provisioning policy

This is where it differs a little from VMware 4.x: You have 4 options:  .

Option	Action
Same format as source	Use the same format as the source virtual machine. (doesn't apply in this case)
Thick Provision Lazy Zeroed	Create a virtual disk in a default thick format. Space required for the virtual disk is allocated during creation. Any data remaining on the physical device is not erased during creation, but is zeroed out on demand at a later time on first write from the virtual machine.
Thick Provision Eager Zeroed	Create a thick disk that supports clustering features such as Fault Tolerance. Space required for the virtual disk is allocated at creation time. In contrast to the flat format, the data remaining on the physical device is zeroed out during creation. It might take much longer to create disks in this format than to create other types of disks.
Thin Provision	Use the thin provisioned format. At first, a thin provisioned disk uses only as much datastore space as the disk initially needs. If the thin disk needs more space later, it can grow to the maximum capacity allocated to it.

( we will choose thin provisioning, and leave it at 16Gb, the installation takes about 7Gb so we should be fine) Step 8: Summary We now have the summary, but we want to edit this machine before submitting it as we want to add the boot drive as the CentOS ISO file. Step 9:Assigning a .ISO image as the boot drive Now we will see the screen below, I reduced the memory to 1Gb from the 2Gb that came by default, and chose the CentOS image to boot from: note to check "connect at power on", but remember to check that off later, as when the VM is rebooted, it will boot from CD/DVD. Final step: start up the machine, and install CentOS 6.2! Edited by: Boaz Minitzer