Home Lab – Installing ESXi7 on your SuperMicro

Posted on by Matt Adam

Guide to install esxi7 on the newly built SuperMicro server. There are a ton of guides out there explaining how to install ESXi onto your host. Honestly, it’s not that difficult. But i’ll post my setup.

Table of Contents

Version

VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) 7.0U2a

Install

Download the ISO file from vmware, should see a file like this: VMware-VMvisor-Installer-7.0U2a-17867351.x86_64.iso

Burn the ISO to a usb, microsd, ssd, etc. In my case, I had a USB laying around and burned it there. File size is around 400MB. I used Rufus 3.14

Insert the usb into SuperMicro usb slot in the back and power on, you will need a keyboard and a monitor hooked up as well.

You will see the ESXi installer loading..
Still loading…
Ready to install, press Enter
F11 to accept the agreement
If you have my exact setup, you’ll see an option in here for the SATADOM, select that.
Select your language.
Set a complex root password
You should NOT see this if you’re installing on the SuperMicro board that I used in my setup. I’m showing this error just in case you run into it. If you do, you need to enable virtualization in your bios.
F11 to repartition and install
Installing ESXI7 on the SATADOM..
Press enter to reboot, and remove your usb.
After it reboots, it will reboot ESXi. You should see a screen simliar to this, press F2 to enter setup and enter your root password.
Go to configure management network, we need to statically set the ipv4 address and some other settings.
Click on IPv4 Configuration and check the radio button next to “Set static IPv4 address and network configuration”. Add your address, subnet, and default gateway and press Enter.
Next goto DNS Configuration and check the radio button next to “Use the following DNS server address and hostname.” Add your dns server (possibly your home modem’s default gateway) and you hostname, localhost is fine.
Lastly under Custom DNS SUffixes, add a fqdn. You will need this later, don’t skip this step!
Accept the changes. This will restart the management network and apply the changes.
And finally, you should be able to access the UI by the IP address. (https://IPADDRESS)

If you followed all the steps above, you should now have ESXi7 installed on your supermicro and you should be able to access the UI. Username will be root, password will be the password you set in the above steps.