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ESXi WebUI

Accessing the WebUI

This one is too simple to warrant a step-by-step guide. Open the address (IP or DNS) of the ESXi server in a browser, log in (the root credentials set during install should work), and <parodyHollywoodHackerVoice>you're in.</parodyHollywoodHackerVoice>.

Create a Network

  1. In the sidebar, navigate to the Networking section.

  2. Go to the Virtual switches tab, and click Add standard virtual switch

  3. Name the switch appropriately, then, assuming you'll be using a dedicated VM to handle routing (running something like VyOS, PFsense, OpenWRT, et cetera), click the x button to delete Uplink 1.

  4. Switch over to the Port groups tab, and click Add port group. Select the virtual switch created in the previous step.

SSH access

  1. In the sidebar, navigate to the Host section - this is the default section when loading the UI, so it moght already be connected.

  2. In the Actions menu, hover over Services and click Enable Secure Shell (SSH)

Add ISOs

  1. SSH into the ESXi Host, and run the following to enable downloads:
esxcli network firewall ruleset set -r httpClient -e true

  1. cd into a datastore directory (under /vmfs/volumes, and create a directory called isos, then cd into it.

  2. Download the ISO files with wget <URL>. ESXi doesn't seem to trust any widely-used HTTP certificates out-of-the-box - attempting to run wget https://www.google.com/robots.txt results in the error "wget: error getting response: Cannot assign requested address". Passing the --no-check-certificate flag can bypass this, but obviously, extra caution is warranted when disabling certificate checking.

Create a VM

  1. In the sidebar, navigate to the Virtual Machines section. Click Create / Register VM. Fill out the presented fields.

  2. When it comes time to configure hardware, make sure that the Network Adapter/s are set to the appropriate fields, and, unless you plan on network booting to the installer, also ensure that CD/DVD drive 1 points to the installation ISO.