Installing Vcenter 5.5

In order to centrally manage ESXi hosts we use Vcenter software. It is available in a variety of editions depending on additional features.

The installation pre-requisites can be found on VMwares' website.

In this lab we are installing Vcenter server 5.5 on a Windows server 2012.

To start load the installation media in the CD/DVD drive.

Navigate to the drive & double click on autorun:

This will bring up the installation wizard. From there click install

The wizard will install the following components:

• Single sign on
• Web client
• Vcenter inventory service
• Vcenter server

Click next to proceed with the installation.

Confirm details & continue.

During the installation we'll see the following message stating that the "script is taking too long". Ignore that message.

On the next prompt enter a license key if one is available. If we do not enter a license key then post install Vsphere will continue to operate in evaluation mode.

In this install we'll use the embedded SQL Server Express 2008 addition to serve as the database component.

Enter the account to be used for running Vcenter services:

The next prompt specifies the port numbers Vsphere will use after it gets installed. Change any port numbers as needed.

In this prompt specify memory to be used by JVM depending on size of deployment:

We'll see the following prompts once installation completes successfully.