In this tutorial I will guide you through installing the vCenter 5 Appliance. The vCenter 5 Appliance is a separate download consisting of an ovf file and 2 vmdk disks. You can download the appliance from www.vmware.com
Installing the vCenter 5 Appliance
1. First up you must have installed an ESXi 5 Server. Download and install the vSphere 5 client from the ESXi 5 host web page. Launch the client and connect directly with the ESXi 5 host.
2. Click on File and select Deploy OVF Template.
3. Browse to the folder where you have downloaded the vCenter 5 Appliance and select the OVF file. Click Next.
4. This screen shows a Summary of the vCenter 5 Appliance information. Click Next.
5. Give the Virtual Machine a Name, the default is VMware vCenter Server Appliance. Click Next.
6. Select the datastore where you would like to install the vCenter 5 Appliance to. Remember on the summary screen in step 4, 5.6GB is required for Thin Provision and 82GB is required for thick provision. Click Next.
7. In my demo I can not select any thick provisioning options as I only had 10GB of available space on my san. Therefore thin provision is my only option. Click Next.
8. Check that all your settings are correct and click Finish.
9. The Virtual Appliance begins to deploy.
10. vCenter 5 Appliance has completed successfully. Click Close.
11. As you can see the vCenter 5 Appliance runs the Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise 11(64-bit) Operating System.
Disclaimer: All the tutorials included on this site are performed in a lab environment to simulate a real world production scenario. As everything is done to provide the most accurate steps to date, we take no responsibility if you implement any of these steps in a production environment.