This is the sixth post in a series out­lin­ing how to set up your own lit­tle vir­tu­al­ized Vir­tual vSphere Lab, if you missed part one, part two, part three, part four, or part five be sure to check them out first!

Now that we have work­ing DHCP and DNS ser­vices in our lab net­work, we’re ready to get out two lit­tle ESXi friends con­nected to it’s man­age­ment ser­vice, VMware vCen­ter Server.

To be able to do that, we obvi­ously need to install vCen­ter Server. Here it goes!

Installing VMware vCen­ter Server

Installing VMware vCen­ter Server is a pretty straight for­ward task.
First off, con­nect the VMware-VIMSetup-all-4.1.0–259021.iso file to the srv-vc1 server.

To do this, right click srv-vc1 and select “Set­tings…”.
In the “Vir­tual Machine Set­tings” win­dow find “CD/DVD (IDE)” and select “Use ISO image file:”. Then browse to your down­load loca­tion and find VMware-VIMSetup-all-4.1.0–259021.iso


Click on “OK” and the Win­dows Auto­Play fea­ture shut prompt you what to do with the newly inserted DVD. Select “Run autorun.exe”.


If you don’t get the Auto­Play win­dow browse to the DVD in Win­dows Explorer and run the DVD from there. Select “vCen­ter Server”


Now, Win­dows User Account Con­trol pops up, and since we know what we’re doing, we’ll just click on “Yes” and continue.

Next up, select which lan­guage to use for the instal­la­tion. Since I don’t speak, or read, any of the other lan­guages “Eng­lish” is my obvi­ous choice.

Click “OK” and the instal­la­tion starts.


Once again, click “Next”, read the “End-User Patent Agree­ment” thor­oughly and click on “Next” again to continue.

Read the “License Agree­ment” before you click on “I agree to the terms in the license agree­ment” then click on “Next” to continue

Now you need to fill our the “Cus­tomer Infor­ma­tion” screen.
Notice that if you don’t pro­vide a license key, it will run in eval­u­a­tion mode, which is what we want for our lab.


click “Next” again to con­tinue to the “Data­base Options” setup screen. The defaults are to install a local Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enter­prise instance for this vCen­ter instal­la­tion, and in our lit­tle lab envi­ron­ment that’s the per­fect option.
Leave the defaults as they are, and click on “Next” . The next screen is where you con­fig­ure which user account the vCen­ter Server Ser­vice runs as, and again accept the defaults and con­tinue by click­ing “Next”

The default des­ti­na­tion folder is fine too, so we’ll quickly click on “Next” to get going

Next up is the “vCen­ter Linked Mode Options” win­dow, and yet again the default of “Cre­ate a stand­alone VMware vCen­ter Server instance” is exactly what this lab requires, so we’ll click on “Next” again

In the “Con­fig­ure Ports” win­dow, we’ll leave the defaults as is as well.
There is no need to make things com­pli­cated by dif­fer­ing from the stan­dard setup.

“Next” again, which brings us to the “vCen­ter Server JVM mem­ory” screen.
Since I seri­ously doubt we will be run­ning more than 100 hosts in our lab envi­ron­ment, the default of “Small (Less than 100 hosts 1024 MB) will do just fine.

After another excit­ing “Next” click, we’re finally ready to start the actual installation.

Click “Install” and the instal­la­tion starts and runs with­out fur­ther inter­ac­tion needed until it’s finished.




Click on “Fin­ish” and your brand new vCen­ter Server is installed!
Even if the vCen­ter Server instal­la­tion is indeed fin­ished, you still need to do at least one more step before you can start using it prop­erly.
You need to get the VMware vSphere Client client installed, to be able to con­nect to the vCen­ter Server and start con­fig­ur­ing it.

Installing the VMware vSphere Client

There are sev­eral ways to get hold of the VMware vSphere Client instal­la­tion files. You can open your browser and browse to the IP address of one of the ESXi hosts and down­load it from there or you can install it from the same DVD that you installed vCen­ter Server from.

I chose to do the lat­ter, and install it from the DVD. To install it from the dvd, open Win­dows Explorer, and dou­ble click the instal­la­tion DVD.
This will bring up the ini­tial installer screen again, but this time we will select vSphere Client

Once again the Win­dows “User Account Con­trol” pops up, and we’ll click on “Yes” to con­tinue.
Since this install is your basic “Next” “Next “Next” instal­la­tion, I’ll just post the screen­shots of the pro­ce­dure. Accept all defaults, and you should be ready to go.


Now the the vSphere Client is installed, you get a new icon on your desk­top called “VMware vSphere Client”, dou­ble click it to start the client.

Fill out lab-vc1 in the “IP address / Name” field and tick the “Use Win­dows ses­sion cre­den­tials” option. Click on “Login” to log into your fresh vCen­ter installation.

You’ll now get a secu­rity warn­ing that tells you that the cur­rent SSL cer­tifi­cate installed on the vCen­ter is untrusted.
This is because vCen­ter cre­ates a self-signed cer­tifi­cate dur­ing instal­la­tion. As this is in a lab envi­ron­ment, that’s fine.
Tick the “Install this cer­tifi­cate and do not dis­play any secu­rity warn­ings for “lab-vc1”.” option and click on “Ignore”.

This will save the cer­tifi­cate from the vCen­ter Server in your vCen­ter Client, and sup­press the SSL cer­tifi­cate warn­ings for fur­ther sessions.

Finally you get logged in, and pre­sented with a warn­ing that since you are run­ning an unli­censed vCen­ter instal­la­tion and that it will stop work­ing after 60 days. Again, this is our lab, we don’t care and click “OK”.

And there it is, both vCen­ter Server and vCen­ter Client installed and ready for use! In part seven, I’ll cover con­nect­ing the vCen­ter Server and the lab ESXi hosts.

Written by . Christian is the owner of vNinja.net and a Senior Consultant for EVRY ASA, specializing in virtualization. Active twitter user and vSoup.net Virtualization Podcast co-host.