In the next step you will need to specify the root password for ESXi web management (make sure to mark it down somewhere, don’t lose it) and press ENTER: Then select the storage device, whatever drive capacity you’ve created earlier: Once done, VMware installer will open it’s configuration option, on the first screen just press Enter: You should first see ESXi installer loading, something like this:Įventually, all the ESXi installation services will start one by one: Once you start ESXi server, it’ll open in VMware player and the initial installation will begin. Highlight the VMware ESXi image and press the green Play button. You should see something like this when you’re done: On the next screen, press Finish button and your Virtual Machine will be created. So if your Linux server takes let’s say 298 GB of space, make sure to specify disk capacity of at least 300 GB. It’s important to remember, that it would be a bit larger (1 or 2 gigs at least) than the total space currently used by your Linux server. You will need to specify the size of the drive. On the next screen, simply name your virtual machine and point to where you want to save the image of ESXi on your Windows hard drive: Then select Installer disk image file (iso) option and point to where you’ve saved the copy of VMware-VMvisor-Installer-6.5.0-4564106.x86_64.iso (or newer) on your drive and press NEXT. Open VMware Workstation Player for Windows and click on Create a New Virtual Machine. Not everyone has ESXi running on the network, so to do that, we’ll try to virtualize ESXi server and run it on the same Windows computer, alongside the VMware converter. VMware Converter doesn’t allow conversion of a physical server to image just like that, it needs a copy of ESXi server running somewhere, otherwise, it won’t work. This is a tricky part to understand, but the whole purpose of installing ESXi is that it’s a requirement of VMware vCenter Converter (which converts the physical server to virtual image).
size 337 MB).Īs a next step, we’ll need to open VMware Workstation Player for Windows 12.5 and install VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) on it.
Windows PC (I’ve used Windows 10 64bit) with enough resources (CPU/RAM/HDD) to create an image of your Linux PC or Linux Server.Thus the reason for this article, hopefully, it’ll help someone.
I’ve kept searching the Internet, but only to find that the instructions were either too old or do not provide a proper step by step guide on how to go about this process. Recently I needed to convert my physical CentOS Linux 7.3 server to a virtual image that I can quickly run from either VMware Workstation Player or VirtualBox (or keep as a backup that can be easily switched on as a copy of the physical server).