hey what's going on guys Brandon Lee with virtualization how to and over the course of the past few videos we have looked at a number of ways to both install vcenter server 8 as well as esxi a a viable option for a home lab environment is VMware Workstation in fact many run VMware Workstation as a home lab environment and it's a great option since your workstation or laptop can serve as a dual purpose machine both for running a home lab environment as well as your normal productivity needs how can you install vcenter server 8 in a VMware Workstation environment in fact can you install vcenter server 8 in VMware Workstation well stick around we are going to look at installing vcenter server 8 in VMware Workstation to see how you need to go about doing this are there any issues that you might run into well let's Dive Right In [Music] thank you typically we deploy vcenter server Appliance by mounting the iso media in Windows as you can see I've done here and we navigate to the UI installer win32 if you're on a Windows box and run the installer and this launches the vcenter server installer Appliance and this is typically the workflow that we use to deploy a vcenter server in a normal way however this process relies on you having another vcenter server or an esxi host that is running to actually deploy your vcenter server Appliance too however if we want to use VMware Workstation we don't have an esxi server or we don't have a another vcenter server environment to Target with this vcenter server installer so what we need to do is to actually deploy the appliance file that is contained on our ISO media now typically what we would be able to do is install an OVA Appliance now if you navigate back out to the root of your ISO image you will see a vcsa folder and inside the vcsa folder is an OVA file it's the VMware vcenter server Appliance 8. 0 OVA Appliance file however I tried this when I try to deploy directly to VMware Workstation everything worked fine in phase one which is the portion of the installer that actually deploys the appliance so that you can then in phase two finish out the configuration such as your SSO domain configuration Etc however at the end of phase two I got an error message the installer not working correctly and it was a fatal error and as it turns out William Lam actually wrote a blog post about this there is some configuration that we need to change the workaround for this particular issue is to extract the OVA Appliance to an ovf file and once we do that then we're able to modify some configuration that we need to modify so that we can successfully deploy the appliance so what I want to do is show you guys the process to first of all create an ovf file from this OVA Appliance file that we have at the root of our ISO image for vcenter Server 8. so what I'm going to use is What's called the ovf tool and as you can see in the root of the iso media VMware actually includes the ovf tool you can also download it from VMware if you just Google ovf tool you're going to land on that download late however I'm just going to Simply use the ovf tool I've copied it to my windows box I've added a path statement so I don't have to worry about the path to the tool and quite simply all you do is you basically point the ovf tool to the OVA Appliance file and then you convert that OVA Appliance to an ovf file we simply say ovf tool feed in the OVA Appliance and then we give a name to our ovf Appliance file so I'm going to do that and as you can see it spits out a thumbprint and then also we get the progress of the creation of this ovf Appliance file so I'm going to come back when this is completed and we'll take it from there as you can see we have successfully created the ovf file from the OVA Appliance file that was contained on the iso image what we're going to do now is navigate to the directory where we created the ovf file as you can see we have the OVA file still there if you want to for housekeeping purposes you can go ahead and delete your OVA file we won't need that as it won't work correctly within VMware Workstation as it is now what we're going to do is delete the Manifest file so we're going to simply just delete the Manifest file now we're going to actually edit the ovf descriptor file so we're going to go in we're going to open this I'm going to open it with notepad plus plus and we're going to search for a stanza in the configuration file and I have it in a notepad document where I can copy and paste it it is called guestinfo.
cis. upgrade. import.
directory basically the error that we get in VMware Workstation in phase two is because this parameter is not populated what we're going to do is edit the ovf file so that we can make this parameter where it's essentially optional I'm going to copy this and we're going to do a control F and we're going to find it we're going to change this value for user configurable to true and we're going to to save the ovf file and that's it now we have essentially made the change that is going to allow us to successfully deploy in VMware Workstation now we can go to VMware Workstation minimize everything else we're going to go to VMware Workstation we're going to go through the workflow to actually create the vcsa appliance and have that deploy from the ovf file that we have just edited and created in VMware Workstation click the file menu we're going to click open and we're going to navigate to our ovf Appliance file so I'm going to go to my desktop vcsa 8 and as you can see we have the ovf appliance file so I'm going to click open and at this point when we open the ovf appliance file it's going to kick off the workflow or the wizard as such that we need to deploy the vcsa appliance and you're going to notice similarities between using the vcenter server install dollar utility and this menu however as you will notice it looks a bit more archaic when we use this more Direct ovef Appliance deployment as opposed to the vcenter server installer utility first off I'm going to accept the EULA I'm going to click next we're going to name the virtual machine I'll let vcsa test we're going to leave the default for where we want to store the virtual machine I'm going to click next here we choose the sizing for our virtual Hardware I want to leave it at the default of tiny vcenter server with embedded PSC on our networking configuration we have a bit of configuration that we need to populate here we're going to set this to ipv4 we want to set the network mode to static we're going to set our IP address the network prefix the default gateway DNS server and host Network identity so we have configured the networking configuration we want to click the SSO configuration and here we're going to populate the SSO directory password and then we're going to configure the system configuration here we get to set the root password on the networking properties I'm going to set the domain name and then also the domain search path now that we have this configured we're going to click the import button and when we click the import button the deployment of the vcsa appliance virtual machine will begin and then that will complete phase one so let's click import as you can see the importing vcsa 8 test which is the name of our vcsa Appliance begins after a few minutes we will be ready to move forward with step two we will be ready to move forward with phase two once phase one of the deployment completes we're going to see that vcenter server will boot inside of our VMware Workstation so this is a great sign we actually have the vcsa appliance up and running now what we need to do that is a departure from what we would do with the vcenter server installer is we're going to have to navigate manually out to port 5480 to finish out phase two of the installation now that we have navigated out to the vami interface of our newly deployed vcenter server Appliance running in VMware Workstation we see a much more familiar site this looks much more like the vcenter server installer utility however again we have navigated to the vami interface and it picks up with Stage 2 from the web interface what we're going to do at this point is we're going to click the setup box in the web interface the setup wizard launches is at this point and now we have Again The Familiar interface that we would see in phase two so let's just go through this workflow we're going to click next to begin and many of the options are already populated from the deployment of the appliance initially using the ovf appliance deployment process that we went through so the only thing I'm going to change here is I'm going to change the time synchronization to specific ntp servers and I'm also going to change the SSH access to activate it now we're to the SSO configuration if you remember in the original configuration for the appliance we went ahead and populated the SSO administrator password I'm not really sure I haven't run through this in a test however I believe it is required to have that parameter populated just so we can get the appliance deployed so it's a bit redundant here but we're going to go ahead and actually reconfigure the SSO domain and on the original configuration as you recall we didn't really set up the SSO domain we simply provided a password so I'm going to re apply the password here and we're going to click next I'm going to uncheck the CEI P program and we finally make it to the summary screen so actually phase two configuration there's not a lot required you verify your network connectivity we set up the SSO domain and we choose our customer experience options and then we're ready to complete once I click the Finish button we're going to get the warning dialog box that basically says at this point we can't interrupt the appliance configuration process it's either going to complete the process or it's going to be left in the state of we're probably going to have to redeploy the Appliance so at this point I'm going to Simply click the OK button and Phase 2 will begin the progress and this will take again a few minutes after just a few minutes my VMware vcenter server running in VMware Workstation refresh the page and now we can see that we have a login page for vcsa vcenter Server 8.
