From the course: Career Essentials in System Administration by Microsoft and LinkedIn

VMware virtualization

- Many organizations are using either Windows Hyper-V or VMware to run their virtual machines. I'm in the VMware website where I can download for free the Workstation 16 Player. I'm going to download and save the application, then run the installation. You need to make sure that virtualization is turned on in your UEFI or BIOS. VMware makes an enterprise product called ESXi. And although the workstation is not going to be in production use, you're going to find that it's a great training tool for sysadmins who want to break into the business. VMware Player has completed and now I'll run the installation. (computer chimes) Installation wizard comes up and I'll choose to accept the license agreement and run through the installation. It's a good idea to install the enhanced keyboard driver and also make sure the add VMware Workstation console tools and click next. It's up to you. If you'd like to join the VMware customer experience and check for product updates. Updates are always a good idea due to security issues. And if you want to have shortcuts installed you can do that. And I'm going to run the installation. You may get prompted to reboot the computer either during the installation or afterwards, so just be prepared. And I'll click finish, if you have a license key, you can choose that. Otherwise, just go ahead and click, finish and restart as prompted. After restarting, I can go ahead and double click on the VMware Workstation Player. And you can enter your license or choose for non-commercial use. We're just using this for demonstration purposes and not actually using it for commercial use, so we can go ahead and continue by clicking on create a new virtual machine. With Hyper-V you can't use the DVD in the DVD drive, You can only use an ISO file. However, with VMware Workstation, you can. So I'll go ahead and click on installer disc and browse to my ISO. Since I don't have one in my drive but if I did have an installation disc in there then I could use that. I'll select my ISO and click next. Now, if I have a product key, I can paste it in here. I can also choose the version to install. If it has multiple versions on that ISO. I'm going to choose Windows 10 Pro. And then we want to put in our password. Otherwise it will prompt us for the password later on, and we can also enter what name we'd like to use to log in. Now we can enter the virtual machine name as well as the location. I'm going to choose the defaults on both and click next. Next we see the maximum disc size. So you're probably going to want to take a look and see what kind of free space you have. So I have around 95 gigs free. So I'm going to say to not use more than 40 gigabytes, which should be enough to install Windows along with any updates it needs. Another option you don't have with Hyper-V, but you do have with VMware is to store the virtual disc as either a single file or multiple files. And that allows you to make it easier to move. If you choose the multiple file option when you'd like to go to another computer. It does reduce performance however, so I'm just going to choose the single file. Since I'm not going to use this for commercial purposes. Make sure the box is checked for power on this virtual machine after creation if you'd like that and click on customize hardware if you'd like to make any changes, such as by default it's going to use two gigabytes of RAM and you can check the free amount of RAM you have in your task manager to decide how much RAM you'd like to use. I've got eight gigs of RAM available. I'm going to choose to use three, and then under processors you can go ahead and choose whatever the amount you'd like. I typically like to go with four. Now I know I don't have 32 processors. So it'll just ignore that if I choose that. I don't recommend changing anything to the virtualization engine, unless you get an error when you try to start up the virtual machine. If you do, look up the error and it will typically tell you when you do a search, which box you need to change here under virtualization engine, in order to clear that error and get the virtual machine started. Another thing to keep in mind would be the network adapter. By default, it's set to NAT, and that means it's used to share the host's IP address. If you'd like to connect directly to a physical network you can choose the bridged option or you can choose the host only, which is a private network. That's just going to be shared with the host. So it's just going to be communication between your virtual machine and the host. And that's a really good way to go if you don't want to run Windows updates because it's not going to be able to get out to the internet and you could choose a custom one as well. I'm going to choose the host only. I can always go out to the internet later and click close and now click finish. It's creating the disc, and when it's done, it's going to install Windows on my virtual machine, and then it's going to power it up. I'm now getting the option just to go ahead and run the installation wizard and noticed even though I chose Professional it went ahead and did the Enterprise installation instead. So keep that in mind that just because you choose a specific OS doesn't mean it's going to actually use it. It's now running through the Windows installation and will complete shortly. Installation times will vary. But in this particular case, it took roughly 10 minutes with eight gigabytes of RAM on the host, three for the virtual machine using an SSD drive. And now it's logging in because I went ahead and said for it to auto start and log in. The server has restarted and can now be used for testing and preparing for work as a sysadmin.

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