In order to launch the virtual machine creation wizard, open up the vSphere Web Client and navigate to one of the vCenter views. From there, right click a container that a virtual machine can reside in (Cluster, ESXi host, resource pool, and so on). Select New Virtual Machine:
The following image displays the Select a creation type pane. There are multiple ways to create a virtual machine, to include cloning, deploying from a template, and so on:
Select Create a new virtual machine and press Next.
First, Enter a name for the virtual machine. being created in the Select a name and folder pane. Don't forget that whatever name is specified here will result in all of the virtual machine's files being named the same. Towards the middle of the following image, a folder or datacenter should be selected for the virtual machine's placement in the VM and Template view within vCenter:
Once the virtual machine's name is specified and its location in the VM and Template view is selected, press Next.
The following image shows the Select a compute resource pane; a cluster (if DRS enabled), ESXi host, resource pool, or vApp should be selected for placement of the virtual machine in the Hosts and Clusters view in vCenter:
Once the desired compute resource is selected, click on Next.
The Select Storage pane prompts you to select which datastore the virtual machine's directory and files will be created on. This is not a permanent selection; the VM's files can be migrated to another datastore at any time using Storage vMotion. If VM storage profiles are set up in vCenter, select which storage profile should be associated with the VM being created:
Once the desired datastore is selected, click on Next.
The next screenshot presents the Select compatibility pane. By selecting a compatible version of ESXi, you are effectively setting the virtual hardware version of the virtual machine being created:
Once the compatible ESXi version is selected, click on Next.
Select the Guest OS Family and Guest OS Version that you plan to install from the list of choices. This is an important selection as it dictates which virtual hardware will be presented to the VM based on its compatibility with the guest OS:
Once the guest operating system has been selected, click on Next.
The Customize hardware pane allows you to configure the virtual machine appropriately for the requirements of the guest operating system and application that will be installed. Here, you can specify the resource allocation amounts and other options. For example, as shown in the following screenshot, the New Hard disk was configured for 10 GB:
If New Hard Disk is expanded (as shown in the following screenshot), the options to select the Virtual disk size and its Disk provisioning type are available. The virtual disk can be up to 62 TB as of vSphere 5.5.
ESXi supports the following virtual disk types:
- Thin Provision: In this case, the disk is allocated and zeroed on demand, as needed, rather than a full provisioning at creation like thick provisioning. This results in a thin provisioned disk having a shorter creation time. Subsequent writes to the blocks result in the same performance as eager-zeroed thick disks. There can be a more effective usage of the datastore space, but it can result in an over-provisioned datastore.
- Thick Provision Eager Zeroed: In this case, the disk space is allocated and zeroed out at disk creation. This increases the time taken to create the disk, but using this type of a disk results in the best performance, even upon first write to each block. This is required for using the Fault Tolerance feature with VMs.
- Thick Provision Lazy Zeroed: In this case, the disk space is allocated at disk creation but each block is not zeroed until the first write. Comparatively, this results in a shorter creation time than eager-zeroed. This is the default option in vSphere Client and is good for most cases.
If CPU is expanded, as demonstrated in the following screenshot, choose how many virtual sockets and virtual cores will be available to the guest operating system.
VMware introduced the ability to configure a multi-core vCPU in vSphere 4.1. This improvement helped avoid socket restrictions from the guest operating systems. The OS vendor generally restricts only the physical CPUs (sockets) and not the logical CPUs (cores). For example, Windows 7 allows a maximum of two sockets, so what if you needed to configure this virtual machine with four vCPUs? A vCPU is presented to the guest OS as a single core within a single socket which limits the number of vCPUs that should be available to an operating system. To assist in solving this limitation, VMware introduced the vCPU configuration options of virtual sockets and cores per socket.
Four single-core sockets equal four vCPUs. Two dual-core sockets also equal four vCPUs. One quad-core socket equals four vCPUs. The difference is how the CPU is presented to the guest operating system, not how the vCPUs will be scheduled on the underlying physical processors.
Will it make a performance impact when using multiple sockets or one socket? No! There's no performance impact between using virtual sockets or cores other than the usable number of vCPUs:
When New Network is expanded, you can choose not only the virtual machine port group but also the Adapter Type:
Once all hardware customizations have been made, press Next.
The last pane of the New Virtual Machine wizard summarizes the virtual machine's configuration for one last review prior to creation of the files. The Ready to complete pane is shown in the following screenshot:
Once satisfied with the virtual machine's configuration, click on Finish.