My team at work has been growing and evolving. With that came a group of guys that challenge me to do more and learn more … faster.
So, one of them is a virtualization junkie (no, geek does not apply). And I have seen him do some pretty cool stuff on his home gear. I have some gear just laying around and I decided to give some stuff a go.
Enter VMware Go, deploying VMware’s Hypervisor remotely was one thing that attracted me. How complicated can it get? Right?
I already have a background with virtualization, but not necessarily a junkie. So I chose the Are you new to Virtualization? option.
That took me to another area to provide the information on the target system. (The system currently is running Windows Server 2008) Provided the IP Address, and new name for the Server.
Ran into the all-important are you sure about this dialog. I Clicked Yes. But remember you are removing the Windows Installation from that system.
Some Click-Once operations kicked off, and then the credentials to check compatibility. Then another dialog to enter the new password for root. And according to VMware Go at this point the installation is taking place. It should be 15 minutes or so and the Hypervisor should be ready to fly. I do see disk activity on the target box at this point, but nothing else on the target.
Now, on My Recent Items I do see status changes:
- Downloading the Hypervisor ISO.
- Then it moved to patching the ISO.
- Then Installing the Bootloader.
- Then rebooting the Remote Computer.
- Writing the Binary Image
- Initializing Newly Created Hypervisor
At this point the system is booting up, I saw the newly installed Hypervisor boot up and it is loading VMware ESXi 4.1.0 . Now I saw the remote system reboot, and now loading up again. Now the last report of status is Installation Finished. But that is for the Hypervisor, the next task is to work with VMs.
So, I took the option of Install OS Manually. Clicked Go. Now the next screen asked me about the details on the new VM. And it presented me with options.
At this point, I clicked Create Virtual Machine.
That will be the next post. The process of creating a VM through VMware Go.