Is VirtualCenter necessary to set up VM's on ESX Server?

[mthiffau]

Hello! I am new to VMWare and and am trying to set up some virtualized home servers. I have a machine that I would like to run a VM with Windows Server 2008 and a VM with Arch Linux. I have a copy of vSphere 4.0, and the linux based ESX Server operating system installed just fine on server machine. I tried to use the Infrastructure Client from my Windows 7 Professional desktop machine to create the new VM's but I get to the "Select Data Store" part of the wizard and am shown that I have no data stores created. I haven't found a way to create data stores in the infrastructure client, and most things on the internet talk about doing it with VirtualCenter.

I tried to install VirtualCenter Server on Windows 7, and at first I got the error where it couldn't find the ADAM directory. Then I installed the Windows 7 version of ADAM, ADLDS, which created c:\Windows\Adam and seemed to be backwards compatible enough to allow the install to get a little further, at which point it failed and said it couldn't create a directory services instance.

I've been fighting this thing, and googling all the problems I've run into now for more than 48 hours. I was hoping that since I don't have more than one physical server to manage, and I don't have a dedicated machine that can be running VirtualCenter Server all the time anyways (my desktop is dualbooted with linux, where I spend most of my time), that it might be possible to do without it.

Any help appreciated,

Matt

[JimKnopf99 · Accepted solution]

Hi and welcome to the forum,

you don´t need a vCenter if you have only one Server. You can use the vSphere Client to manage the Server.

If i understand you, you have already installed the ESX Server and have a local datastore.

Now, you can download the vSphere Client by opening the Webpage of your ESX Server. Type http://<IP Adress>

Install the Client and you are able to create Virtual Machines.

You can also use the ESXi Version.

But i recomend you to read some VMware Paper like this

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r40_u1/vsp_40_u1_esxi_i_get_start.pdf

Frank

[mike_laspina]

Hi,

vCenter is not required to configure ESX or ESXi, I would say your issue centers around a storage creation problem.

Select the ESX server object -> Configure -> Storage -> Add storage.

If you have usable raw disk it should show up and be availble to create a VMFS datastore with.

Normally this is created automatically so I suspect your hardware is the issue.

Regards,

Mike

vExpert 2009

[rengler]

What kind of machine are you using as the ESX(i) host? If the hardware in the storage subsystem isn't supported, you won't see any storage and you won't be able to create a place to put your VMs. My home setup has two machines: one for the ESX host and one running OpenFiler. The former has no supported storage hardware in it but has a fast CPU and lotsa memory. The latter is exposing its storage via NFS; you can map to it from the Infrastructure Client from the Storage portion of the Configuration menu in ESX.

Having VirtualCenter doesn't make creating storage possible.