Get Started with VMware Virtualization

0:00Hey there everyone, what's up and welcome. I hope your day is going awesome. If you haven't met before, I'm Kelvin Tran and I remember when I was first learning virtualization . This must have been back in 2012 or somewhere near that. So a number of years back and I fired up my copy of Orco Virtual Box for no other reason than hey it was free. I went through the whole rigmar ole of creating a virtual machine. I set the virtual machine to use. It must have been Windows 7 at the time I believe and I went through customizing the hardware for that virtual machine and I clicked finish and start and it just sat there on what I now know was the network boot screen because I didn't have an operating system because I clicked Windows 7 and thought hey that's just going to install Windows 7 for me. What's nice so file? No one ever said that I was a particularly smart 8 year old but then I got to thinking right now that if I had had some soup to dessert start to finish Zero to Hero guy on using virtualization and starting up virtual machines that

1:15could have been a heck of a lot easier of an experience and hey it's 2023. It's never been easier to start with virtualization. So that's what this series is going to be. Something that I could have used then and something that you can use now if you are just getting started with virtual ization and you haven't been exposed to it before. Now you might well have your eyes set on some more advanced goal like working with VMware vSphere or working with VMware NSX or some other kind of virtualization product out of the millions of applications there are for virtualization but the hum will be getting for all of that is going to be the virtual machine. So we're going to go ahead and kick this series off by talking about what virtualization is in general talking about some of the benefits that we get from using virtualization and then we're going to go ahead and take a look at deploying a Windows 11 based virtual machine on your own computer that way you can get started with virtualization get some practice with it get comfortable with the concept and then you can move on to some of your

2:31loftier virtualization goals. So I'll catch you in the next video where we talk about what virtualization really is. Let's go.

0:00So if you've been in the IT industry for really any amount of time nowadays, there is a solid chance that you've heard of Katerm virtual machines and virtualization and maybe it was a co-worker saying, "Oh, I have to deploy a virtual machine today." Or, "God forbid, you get a priority one ticket that says, "Oh, no, everything's down because the virtual machines are down." And if you've ever asked, "Well, what's a virtual machine and why are they such a big deal?"

0:32You probably got the classic answer for what virtual machines are, which is, "Oh, it's just a computer inside of a computer." And then you have to go through the mental gymnastics of trying to figure out, "Wait, do I take off the side panel of one and then put one computer inside of the other?" Like, "How does that work?" And so in this video, because I actually think that the computer inside of a computer definition is a good start, because it gives you a nice mental image for sort of what we're doing with virtualization.

1:06But I think that we can do better. And so I want to go ahead and show you what virtualization really is, and more importantly, why the heck we care anyway? Let's go. So as we begin to talk about virtualization, I actually don't want us to think about technology right now. I want us to think about running a small business. So let's pretend that we're owners of a small store selling. You know what? I'll leave that part to your imagination, actually. But whatever it is that we're selling, we're going to have a lot of responsibilities inside of that store to help keep it running.

1:39So let's go ahead and just for simplicity for this example, let's condense it down to two main responsibilities. So the first one, let's go ahead and write this down here, is going to be customer service. So greeting customers, processing transactions, basically someone akin to a cashier. And then the second main responsibility here is going to be to restock the shelves, because let's say that we are just that popular of a store, items are just flying off the shelves, we need someone on the floor to make sure that every shelf stays populated.

2:19So how do we make sure that we have enough people on the store to handle these responsibilities right here? Well, there's a couple of options that we could take. The first option, the most logically intuitive probably, is going to be we've got two responsibilities here. So let's go ahead and hire two people, one free responsibility. So let's say that employee number one right here, this is a cashier, and then we're going to hire a second employee to be a stocker to keep the shelves populated.

2:54So on the surface, this seems like it would be a great system. You've got a dedicated cashier that's processing transactions and making sure that customers know where to go, and then you have a stocker that's roaming the floors, making sure that none of the shelves are empty. What's the problem? Well, in a larger store, you might actually see a division like this, where you have dedicated people for each of these roles. But what if you're not a bigger store?

3:24What if you're just a really small store, and it happens to be a really slow day? Well, what happens with the cashier? Well, if they have no one to process a transaction for, well, what happens when you just go out their phone and start scrolling and mind you, as a small business owner, you're paying them for that time. They just have nothing to do. And if it is a really slow day, and you have a stocker there who's roaming the floors, well, no one's buying any of these items, the shelves aren't going to be empty.

3:55You're also paying a second person here to not really do anything. Okay, well, you might argue then that, yeah, when it's slow, they're not going to be doing anything. But once the store starts picking up, once it gets busy, they're surely going to be pulling their own weight, right? Well, maybe. But here's the thing with something like a small store. Let's take a look. If we graph out the time against the number of customers that are in the store, they're not going to be busy all the time.

4:25That graph for an average small store is going to look, maybe something like this, right? Where you have these periods right here, of a lot of customers, a very, very busy time. And then you have these periods down here, where you don't have any customers at all. And during those periods down here, where you don't have a lot of customers, what if we could just have the cashier here, step away from the area of the cash register, and just restock the shelves themselves?

5:01In other words, what if we don't have someone who's only job is to stop the shelves, and instead just have this one cashier right here do both of those responsibilities? And as the owner of the store, you're probably like, "Actually, yeah, that makes a ton of sense." Assuming that it's not too burdensome on this one cashier to do both of these responsibilities at any given point in time, that means that you can save on staffing the second person, which means that you don't have to pay their salary, which means that you don't have to handle benefits and insurance and any of that, because the one thing that no small business owner has ever said is, "Hmm, you know what I wanna do today?

5:50"I wanna hire someone and staff them and pay their salary "just to get no real benefit out of it." So the key idea that I want you to keep in mind here is that instead of looking at this cashier as you're just a cashier, and the only thing that you can do is be a cashier, we look at this person instead as, "Hey, you're a staff member who works for the store." So as well as being a cashier, if you have room to fit some other responsibilities into your schedule, well, you're a person who works for the store and you're perfectly capable of, in this case, the second responsibility right here.

6:32So, simplified example out of the way, let's go ahead and take flat logic and move it into computing. So here's an example of a server rack right here. If you've ever had the privilege of being in a data center, you've probably walked down long rows of these that go on four days, and in these server racks, we might have networking equipment, we might have servers obviously, and we might have some storage equipment as well.

7:02So, a long, long time ago before I was even alive, the way that servers were typically deployed in data centers, it goes something like this. So, let's say that we had a physical 2U server right here in green, and this guy is serving as our domain controller. And then, let's go ahead and add in another server. Let's say this one, this one is a big boy for you if I can count correctly, that's for for you right here. And this guy is our file server.

7:34Let's go ahead and add some more servers. So, let's go ahead and add one more right here that is going to be a web server. And just for fun, let's go ahead and add in one more server. So, I'm gonna go over here now because I'm running out of space over there. So, let's go ahead and add another server. And we'll call this an email server because this is the 1990s, and we're still running email servers on-prem and Zav in the cloud. So, less again, is a system that seems like it would work just fine.

8:09But you remember in our previous example there, the problem came up when we were looking at a person and saying your role and your primary responsibility is less, therefore, the only thing that we're gonna task you to do is this. That was the problem over there. Over here, we have the exact same problem, except now it's servers. We're looking at a server and saying, this is your responsibility. You are a domain controller or you are an email server.

8:39And the only thing that you can do is serve email. Well, what if there's just not that much email to send right now? Actually, better yet, what if we had this web server right here and we had the graph from the last example where there were some times where there were a lot of people trying to get into a store, or in this case, visit the website, and then other times, it's not quite so busy. Well, during that up period of time with a lot of people, you have that web server utilizing maybe close to all of its hardware resources.

9:18And then during the other times where it's not that busy, well, you have that hardware that you paid for, that you paid thousands of dollars for sitting right there, not doing anything at all, just being a web server. So the way that we're gonna solve this problem right here in terms of the inefficiency is pretty much the exact same way that we solved the last problem that we had. But one catch, maybe we don't want a single operating system running, hmm, let's see, our domain controller, our email server, our file server, our web server.

9:58Well, what if the web server runs on Linux and the domain controller, because we're using Microsoft's Active Directory, we have to run it on a Windows server. What do we do there? How do we boot two separate operating systems at the exact same time? So what we're gonna wanna do here is firstly, scratch this out because it's no good. We don't wanna do things this way. What we can do instead is right here, we're gonna add a big server.

10:29This is going to be a server with a lot of CPU, a lot of memory, a lot of storage. And we're gonna make the server right here something called a hypervisor. You can also call it a host if you want. And if we just blow up our host right here, make it really big. What we can do is basically split this hosts or hypervisor's resources up between these four servers that we had.

11:01So what did we have? We had our domain controller right there. Let's go ahead and switch my colors. We had our file server, we had our web server. So whoops, www. And then we had our email server as well. And here's the cool part. These virtual servers right here are these virtual machines from the host's perspective. These VMs as we call them are just running basically as applications.

11:35If you're on your own personal computer and you open up your web browser, for example, it's gonna take up a certain amount of CPU, a certain amount of RAM, depending on what web browser, it's gonna be more RAM than some other browsers, wink wink. And these virtual machines right here will take up a certain amount of RAM, a certain amount of CPU, a certain amount of storage. But because they are separated within the host, we can run separate operating systems and separate applications and keep separate environments.

12:09So going back to our earlier point, that the main controller can run the Windows server, the file and the web and the email server, they can all run Linux and their own sets of applications and settings. But physically, we just have the one server right here. We don't have these separated physical servers. We're just running different applications, different virtual machines within this one physical hypervisor host.

12:39This is awesome. That's been a big picture look at why we would really want to use a virtualization in the first place. Throughout this entire video, throughout this entire series, and honestly, throughout your entire virtualization journey, it will always come down to one key word, efficiency. So with that in mind, in the next video, we're gonna go ahead and take a look at some of the benefits that we can net using virtualization.

13:13So I'll catch you over there for that. In the meantime, I hope this is informative for you, and I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00So in the previous video, we took a look at how virtualization actually works and the core idea that we're working with when we deploy virtual ization being, hey, we've got some hardware here. Instead of saying we can only use this hardware for one purpose, let's let our hardware multitask for us and fulfill multiple responsibilities in our environment. And so in this video, what I want to do is pick up where we left off there and take a look at the benefits of using virtualization. Let's go.

0:36So I've cleaned up the board a little bit here and I just want to take some time real quick to take a look at some of the benefits of doing things this way because there are a lot of benefits, but there's a few big ones. So the first main benefit is going to be reduced cost. So reduced TCL, TCL is an acronym that stands for total cost of ownership. And specifically, it's going to help us reduce both our CapEx and our OpEx.

1:10So how does it help us to reduce CapEx? Well, if you think about the fact that without virtualization, we'd have to buy four physical servers and with virtualization, we just have to buy one using the example that we did previously. Well, it's generally going to be cheaper. And by generally, I mean pretty much always going to be cheaper to buy one beefier server than it is going to be to buy four individual less high powered servers.

1:42Now that's going to be assuming that that one beefy server we buy is roughly equivalent in horsepower and resources to the four individual servers. But the point still stands that generally speaking, when you buy less servers, you spend less money. Now, in terms of CapEx, we also get other benefits as well because we have less servers. Well, that means that we don't have as much physical footprint. That means that we don't need as many racks, which reduces our cost there.

2:15And with less racks, that means that the building that contains those racks, your data center, doesn't have to be so big that reduces your cost of the building. I could go on and on, but compared to OpEx, the savings in CapEx are pretty obvious. The savings in OpEx are not so obvious. How would you save on your operational expenditures? Well, here's an example. Let's say that you don't have your own data center premises.

2:47What you're doing as a company is going out to a co-location provider. So this is a company that has built up a data center and they're basically leasing it out, like an apartment, but for servers. Well, generally in a co-location provider's facility, you're paying by rack unit. So the more rack units you take up in that co-location provider's racks, the more servers you have, the more you're going to pay that co-location provider.

3:18Ah, but we reduced our physical footprint by going with a virtualization approach. So less servers, less rack units, less cost going to that co-location provider. The other thing that you could save big on here is licensing. So we're going to talk more about how VMware handles licensing in a later video in this series. But even though you do have licensing for the actual hypervisor software that you're using to run those virtual machines, you have other licensing savings that come along the way.

3:58Let me give you a quick example. And I know that this is a VMware series, but Microsoft has a really easy example to reach to here. When you use a Windows server as a hypervisor, the feature is called HyperV. And you're using a Windows Server Data Center Edition server to run your VMs. Let's say you have a bunch of Windows Server virtual machines. There is a feature. It's called automatic virtual machine activation AVMA, where you can use your one Windows Server Data Center license for your hyper visor to activate and to license all of your Windows Server virtual machines.

4:38So whereas Microsoft would have you buy a license for every single server without virtualization with virtualization, you just have to buy that one license key for your Windows Server hypervisor and it'll license all of those virtual machines. And with the way that Microsoft handles licensing, trust me, that is a giant savings. Both in money and headaches. So that's one. What's another one? Well, you got the flexibility of virtualization as well.

5:12And while I'm at it, I'm actually going to go ahead and add scalability to this one as well because I can go ahead and knock these two points out in one. So how does this make our data center more flexible? Well, we can really just think of the hypervisor as a pool of resources because the job of the hypervisor is just to run our virtual machines that are serving as the actual web servers or email servers.

5:42We don't have to say this physical server is dedicated for any one of those specific jobs. We can say that this physical server exists to provide a giant pool, a giant bucket of CPU power, a giant bucket of RAM, a giant bucket of storage. And here's the key. We can take out of those buckets as we want. So we need a new web server. Yeah. Okay. That's fine. Pull some CPU out of the bucket, pull some RAM out of the bucket.

6:13That's cool. And the scalability piece of the puzzle comes into play when let's say we have a web server that has a lot of demand and we did not give that web server enough resources. Well, let's see. Let's look in the bucket for the CPU power. Yep. We've got some more CPU power left. Let's look in the bucket for RAM. Okay. We've got some RAM left. Let's pull some more CPU. Let's pull some more RAM and let's give that to a web server so that it can use it to provide that service and meet this new increase level of demand.

6:51And this concept is actually called elasticity. It comes into play when we talk about the cloud a lot, but with virtualization because we are doing a lot of the same things where we have a hypervisor. It's just a giant pool of resources. Once again, we can have a lot of the same conversations about elasticity as we would in the cloud. So if you take nothing else away from this video, the big thing to remember is that with virtualization, instead of dedicating physical resources, a whole physical server to run a particular service or to do a particular job.

7:32Now we've got physical equipment that we are turning into pools or buckets of resources and then provisioning these virtual machines, these virtual servers that we can pull resources from out of those buckets as we want. Now in the next video, we're going to go ahead and take a look at how you can actually start getting your feet wet in the world of virtualization and start practicing. Because the big thing that you might be saying to me right now is Kelvin, I don 't live sleep in the data center.

8:08I don't know if you've noticed that or not. How am I supposed to practice when you need apparently all of this expensive data center gear? Well, you actually don't. In fact, if you're watching this on a computer, on a desktop or a laptop, you can start practicing virtualization right now. And we're going to take a look at how to do that in the next video. So I'll catch you over there. In the meantime, I'll listen to the forum for you and I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00So if your goal is to work with things like VMware's vSphere or ESXi product for data center virtualization eventually, one of the best ways that you can start practicing right now today is by running virtual machines on your local computer, getting it sent from scratch, creating a virtual machine, getting it all working, that is a very, very good source of practice to get comfortable with virtual ization.

0:30And fortunately for us, that's exactly what we're going to be doing. We're going to go ahead and in this video, take a look at a product from VMware called VMware Workstation. And that's what we call a desktop hypervisor. It's going to let us run virtual machines on our very own desktop or laptop computer. The one that you might very well be watching this video on right now. Let's go. So I have a web browser open right here, but we're actually not going to start off on the web browser.

1:03And before I go on, I do want to say that right now, let's go ahead and pull up my Windows version. I am running Windows 11. So this is really going to be applicable for any modern version of Windows. If you're running a Mac or you're running some distribution of Linux, the key things that you're trying to verify here are going to be the same as what I'm looking at. But the specific way that you're going to be verifying those things will differ .

1:34So if you need some guidance as to where you can actually find what we're verifying here on your specific operating system platform, just go ahead and Google your platform and then documentation how to find and then fill in what we're specifically looking for. So with that out of the way, let's go ahead and open up Task Manager on this Windows system here. Now, if you're running Windows as well, there's a couple of ways you can do this. You can either do a control of delete and then open Task Manager that way.

2:07Or you can do what I'm about to do, which is just to press Control, Shift, Escape on the keyboard and that will open up Task Manager. So it opened up on another monitor over here. So I'm just going to drag it right over here so you can see it. Let's go ahead and maximize this window right here. And for you, it might start up on processes. Just go ahead and click on the Performance tab right over here. If you do get on the Processes tab here, this is going to be where all of the information that we're looking for is going to be contained.

2:42So really, there are four things that we care about in this view here. There's potentially more, but we're just going to take a look at four key attributes of the system. So the first two have to do with your CPU. And the first one, we can take a look at a couple of places. So right here, you can see my core count and right down here, you can see some more information about the specifics of my processor. What we care about here is the quantity of our CPU resources.

3:18And what we really care about with our CPU resources is not necessarily this base speed here or this clock speed. So we do have to make sure that that's not too low for basic virtualization. But any reasonable processor made within the last 10 years or so should be fine for our purposes right now. But what we do care about are our cores right here and our logical processors.

3:50I will get to that distinction in a moment. So why do we care about those two specifications specifically, pun not intended ? Well, the reason is because virtualization is what we call a highly parallel ized application. Wow, say that five times fast. And that is just a whole lot of technology mumbo jumbo to say that virtual ization benefits from having a lot of cores. Now how much is a lot do we need 16 cores like I have here?

4:23Is this not even enough? Well, the answer is we don't need a whole lot at all, not for what we're doing today. Now the more VMs that you have inevitably, the more CPU resources that you're going to need to use and the more cores you're going to benefit from. But for right now, because we're just running the one or maybe even a handful down the line if you want to keep practicing, but we're just running Windows 11 virtual machines here. We don't need a whole lot of CPU resources.

4:54Honestly, if you have at least a quad core, which a lot of systems made within the last few years are going to have, you are perfectly good to go here. But the thing that I do want to point out right here is that when we look at our cores, that's not actually what we care about here, our core count on this CPU right now is 16. Our logical processor count on the CPU however is 32. So it's list number right here that we actually care about for virtualization.

5:28Now you might be asking why are these two numbers different? Now on some lower NCPUs, they might not actually be different because those lower NCPUs, they don't have something called hyper threading. That's the name on the Intel side and then AMD calls it simultaneous multi threading or SMT. Basically, what that means is when we look at a CPU core, so the individual processing unit inside of your CPU inside of your processor, that core is going to be split up into two what we call threads.

6:07And those threads are actually what does the processing. Now when we look at it from the host's perspective, from our main computer, the main computer can tell the difference between full two thread cores and an individual thread. However, here's the big thing. When we talk about a virtual CPU, so that's a CPU core that we're giving to a virtual machine, that virtual machine thinks that the threads are cores.

6:38So when we go into VMware and we say, hey, this virtual machine gets four cores , what we're really saying is that it gets four threads. And in the context of this CPU right now, this is a higher NCPU, it's a Ryzen 9 processor. So it has, in this case, simultaneous multi threading. That means that each core has two threads. So when I say that I'm giving a virtual machine four cores, I'm really just giving it two of these actual cores, but the virtual machine thinks it's four because again, it can't tell the difference between a thread and a core.

7:16So that's enough of that right there. Let me clear off our board a little bit here so we can talk about the second thing that we care about. And really, this is going to be just this one line right here. I don't want to draw a box around it because it's so small. I block off the text. This says virtualization. And in my case, it says enabled. So why is this important? Well, in a previous video, you might remember that I said that a virtual machine basically just runs as an application from a 10,000 foot view.

7:50Yes, that is true. From the host's perspective, it uses resources like any other application. But when you get down really close and look at the details of how the CPU actually treats virtualization, it's not necessarily the same as any other application like your web browser. For example, in fact, there are specific features that have to be enabled on your CPU in order for your CPU to support running virtual machines.

8:20Now the specific name of the feature is going to depend on your processor vendor. So on Intel, this is going to be called VT dash X and VTT. They do slightly different things, but they're complimentary features. So you should enable them together when you can. And then on AMD, this is just going to be something called AMD. So if you see the text enabled right here, as you do here, you're good to go.

8:53If you see this able, that means that you can't run virtual machines on this system. But that doesn't have to be a thing that goes on forever. In fact, if it says disabled right there, what that usually means if you have a reasonably modern CPU is not that it can't run virtual machines is that these features right here are disabled. So what you have to do, and this is a moment where you should Google motherboard, fill in your motherboard, how to enable virtualization.

9:28And what you usually have to do is boot into your BIOS or UEFI firmware interface and find options that say virtualization and those are going to be the options that let you enable these features right here. And then once you enable them and you reboot into windows, usually 99% of the time that clears this message right up. So that's it for the CPU tab here. Trust me, the memory and the storage is a lot more straightforward.

9:59So we go over to our RAM here, really the adage and virtualization is that the more RAM the better. But that's not to say that we can't have enough RAM for our purpose. So do you need 128 gigs like I have here? Absolutely not. In fact, if you have eight gigs of RAM, 16 gigs of RAM, that is perfectly sufficient to run a handful of virtual machines like we're going to want to do here. And then the last thing we want to go ahead and take a look at is our storage.

10:34Now I have a number of disks here. I'm just going to go ahead and take a look at my C drive just because that's where we're actually going to go ahead and store the virtual machine in this example. And really we mainly care about capacity. We also care about these attributes here. So response time or latency and speed do play a consideration. Again, this is one of those things where as long as you're running on preferably an SSD or even a mechanical drive that's reasonably modern, that's reasonably functional, these should not be too much of a problem.

11:11So really the main thing that you want to focus on is capacity. Do you have enough storage space to contain your virtual machines? And really whether you have enough is going to come down to how much storage you give your virtual machine and that's something that we'll go ahead and take a look at in the next video. So that's all we need to do in Task Manager. If you're like, I'm good to go. My computer can run virtual machines. It meets all the conditions that we talked about. Then awesome.

11:41We're going to have a lot of fun. If your computer can't quite do it or if you're watching along on something that's not a desktop or a laptop computer like an iPad or some other kind of mobile device , that's okay as well. You're not going to be able to deploy a virtual machine and go along with me here as we do it. But you can still watch along and see how we're deploying the virtual machine here in this demo and get your exposure that way. So just Google for VMware workstation right here and it enter and that should bring you to hopefully what is an up-to-date link to get to the workstation page.

12:23So this right here is showing us the workstation pro page, but this is the paid version of the software. I'm going to go ahead and go and click the back arrow here and I'm going to open a list up to a new tab. But here's what I'm looking for. Workstation player. You can see the big letters download for free. So let's click on VMware workstation player and that's going to bring us to this page here with those big letters free free free.

12:53Now here's the important thing to keep in mind about these two products here. Workstation player works. Again, no pun intended, but workstation pro, if you're running a lot of virtual machines by online, $200 I think is the price. Yeah, $200 for workstation pro. If you're running a lot of virtual machines, there are some nice creature com forts here that pro has that player doesn't have, but don't feel compelled to buy pro.

13:25If you're just a casual virtualization user, workstation player is perfectly functional. And actually, if you're on the edge here, if we X this tab here and go back to the main page, you can see here there's actually a download trial button. So you can evaluate workstation pro. So if you want workstation player, that button is right here, we're going to go ahead and take a look at how to download the trial for workstation pro that way you can install it.

13:57So I'm going to click on this download trial button right here and go down and here's some buttons that you can download for your platform. So Windows or Linux. Now if you're on the Mac, you can run VMware too. It's just a different product called VMware fusion. We're not going to take a look at it in this video, obviously because I can't install it, but you can go ahead and Google VMware fusion if you're on the map. And a lot of this is going to be the same between workstation and fusion, but I 'm on Windows.

14:29So I'm going to go ahead and click on download now. And that's going to allow me to download this to my local file system. As you can see, I've already downloaded this here. And so I'm going to click on cancel and once that's downloaded for you, you can just go ahead and run that executable file, install VMware workstation. It's a pretty simple process to go through basically just like any other application. So I'm not actually going to run the installer for VMware workstation because it's not going to let me go through the process since I already have ta ta VMware workstation pro 17 installed on the system.

15:10Now, as well as installing workstation pro, when you run the installer for work station pro, it also installs ta ta workstation player. And this is the utility that we're going to go ahead and take a look at in the next video. So we're going to go ahead and dive into creating a virtual machine in this interface. So I'll catch you over there in the meantime, I'll just inform it for you and I 'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00So in the previous video, we took a look at how to make sure that our computer was actually prepared to run virtual machines by first making sure that it had the specifications and the grunt and horsepower to actually run virtual machines and then we scoured around the VMware's website to find the download for VMware workstation, which is the software that we're actually going to be using on our computer, on our Windows-based computer that's important to keep in mind to run virtual machines .

0:35Well, here in this video, we're gonna go ahead and springboard off of where we left off there to actually create a virtual machine inside of workstation player running Windows 11. Let's go. So we're back where we left off in our web browser here from the last video because there I actually forgot to mention a very important step. So we'll mention it now. You remember how in the intro of the series, I mentioned that when I was starting out with virtual virtualization that I didn't know you have to have an operating system installed disk. Well, that raises an important question.

1:15The operating system doesn't install itself. You need to provide an operating system disk and ISO file usually for that installation to happen. And so the question is where are we getting that install disk? Now the answer to that question depends on what operating system you're using. It was a lot harder in 2012, especially for Windows from Microsoft to get the ISO file. But now Microsoft just makes it available to anyone.

1:46So what we're gonna do is open up a new tab here and we're just gonna Google download Windows 11. This feels like it's shady and not legit, but I guarantee you, let's hit enter here. The first entry right here is from Microsoft. So let's click on this link here and scroll down and you do not know what I would have done in 2012 to have lists right here like that. So what we're gonna do here is click on select download.

2:22There's only one option, download now and select our language. So English US from that and here's our 64 bit download. So if we download that, here's our ISO file. Let's go ahead and save that and just like that, you have the installation media for Windows 11. It continues to blow my mind every time I press that button. So you can see right here that our download has finished.

2:52I can open up our folder location and you can see that ISO file right here in this folder right under our workstation installer executable from the previous video. So we've got all of the building blocks out of the way. Now it's time for what might be your very first virtual machine. Isn't this exciting? So I'm gonna go ahead and drag this folder out of the way here and put it in its place. The workstation 17 player window.

3:24So from here, what we do is we create a new virtual machine and there's a couple of options here. So one is you can use the installer disk. Now when they say disk, the reason that this is grayed out right here and it's probably gonna be grayed out for you as well is because installer disk refers to a physical CD or DVD. Yeah, you remember those. So if you had a physical CD that you can install the operating system from and an optical drive to put it in, then this would let you select the optical drive that you want VMware to read from.

4:08But in this case, we have a disk image file or ISO. So right here, we could put the ISO file in, but then it's gonna take us through something called the EZ install, which is a version of something called unattended deployment. So the idea is if you wanted to, you could put your ISO file right here, specify things like your product key, and then let VMware take care of the installation for you.

4:38I've never been a big fan of EZ install, so I always just go with I will install the operating system later and then handle it myself. Just know that that option is right there for you. So what we're gonna do here is click on next and it's gonna ask us what operating system we want to use. So if it doesn't select Windows 11 by default, that's okay. Just grow up to the very top right here and click on Windows 11 and we'll click on next.

5:11It's gonna ask us for the name of the virtual machine. So just for giggles, I'm gonna change this to CBT nuggets and then demo. So you can have spaces in this name if you want, because what the name of the virtual machine is really doing is it's naming a folder in the location on your physical hard drive or SSD where the VM is going to be stored. So by default, that's going to be in your user directory in your documents folder and then a folder called virtual machine.

5:49We'll take a look at that folder in a moment after we create this virtual machine. But with that, let's go ahead and continue and before I do actually, I should probably type W11 here just so we know what operating system this is running and then we'll click on next. And here is a special step for Windows 11. If you don't run Windows 11, if you choose to run Windows 10 or something else like that, you probably won't need to have this step right here.

6:20But we're running Windows 11 and Windows 11 and presumably successive additions in the future are going to have this requirement of a trusted platform module. So to be clear, this does nothing to encrypt the rest of the data on your host. Though we have a couple of options here. The default option is going to be to only encrypt the files that you need to support this trusted platform module.

6:51So this is the option that we're going to go ahead and go with. But if you want to be more secure, you can also choose to encrypt every file that's associated with this virtual machine. So again, that's not going to be any other data on your drive, just the files for this VM. So once you've got that option selected, we need to provide a password. Now word of caution, this password is going to protect the encryption keys that are stored on the TPM long story short.

7:26If you don't have the password, you cannot access those encryption keys, which means that you can't decrypt the data to access the virtual machine. So too long didn't read or didn't listen in this case, do not lose this password. So with the importance of this password in mind, we're going to pick the four knocks of passwords, capital P, a S S W O R D. Hey, it has a capital P. That means it's secure, right?

7:56And then we will confirm the password. So to be clear, if you're actually doing this for any important virtual machines, please, I beg you, don't use password for your password. Now, it'll also give you the option by default to remember the password in the Windows credential manager. In this case, I'm actually going to go ahead and deselect that you should keep it in there. If you plan to use this virtual machine long term, you can see that because we don't have remember the password selected, it'll say if you forget the password , your data will be lost in big letters.

8:40So it is giving you fair warning here, but because I'm just going to go ahead and destroy this virtual machine, pretty much right after I'm done recording this video, I'm fine with not having to deal with remembering the password. So I'm just going to go ahead and click OK now. It is important to note that if you are selecting this option or rather not selecting it with an actual long term virtual machine, you should have some plan to store the password in something like a password manager.

9:18That way, you don't have to rely on your own memory to remember that password, but with that out of the way, let's go ahead and continue on. And here's where we select how much storage we want to allocate to this virtual machine. So a couple of things. First, I always choose to store the virtual disk as a single file. So here it says that if you split the disk, it makes it easier to move the virtual machine.

9:49But if you have a larger disk, as it also says here, it may reduce performance. So I always choose to just store the virtual disk as a single file. You can split it if you want. I just don't generally recommend. And I'm fine with the 64 gigabyte capacity right here. If you want more, go ahead and give it just keep in mind that you actually have to have the physical storage capacity to back it up. So with that set, how you like it, let's go ahead and click on next and here's the finished screen.

10:25So here's the summary. We're naming this CBT Nuggets demo W 11. We're storing it in our documents folder. This is going to be a workstation 17 version virtual machine. It's running Windows 11. We've given it a 64 gigabyte hard drive and we've given it four gigabytes of memory as well as two CPU cores. Now, if there's anything that you don't like on the screen, for example, maybe you want to change the amount of RAM it has or maybe you want to change the amount of CPU cores that it has.

11:03There's a couple of ways that we can do that. So the first way is right here. We can click on customize hardware and this is going to give us this screen where we can change the virtual machines settings. I'm going to go ahead and close that out actually and click on finished to actually create the virtual machine. And in a moment, it's right there. Now, if you want to change the virtual machine settings after the fact, there's a couple of ways you can do that.

11:36The first way is to click on this edit virtual machine settings link right here . That takes us to the same screen that we saw earlier or if I click cancel right here, the other way to get to it is going to be to click the virtual machine right here to make it active. So make sure this is blue right here. Click on player, click on manage, click on virtual machine settings. You can see side note. There's a shortcut you can use. That's a third way.

12:07But if you click right here, that brings us to once again, the exact same screen that we saw earlier. So now that we're here, let's say we want to change the amount of RAM that we 're making available to this virtual machine. Well, all we have to do is use our slider here. So let's say that we want to go up to eight gigabytes so we can slide up there. And once it hits 8192 megabytes, we know that we're at eight gigabytes. Alternatively, you can also just directly type in this box.

12:40So if you want to do eight gigabytes, actually, let's do four gigabytes here. You can see that once we enter right here, sorry, edit virtual machine settings . You can see that it went back down to four gigabytes. And then we can change this to 8192. You can see here that the slider is now back at eight gigabytes. If we go down to processors right here, you'll see that we have number of processor course. So remember, this is the number of threads, not the number of cores as it's really saying here.

13:14So this is actually a single processor core. So if I want to give it two processor cores, I'm going to give it four logical processors. Don't worry about either of these two check marks. These are more advanced features that we don't need right now. Now, if we hop on over to the heart this tab, here's some information about the heart this capacity. There's not much that we really need to do here other than to look at how much size it's actually taking up.

13:45Now, you might be saying eight megabytes. Wait, I gave it 64 gigabytes. And the reason is that by default, this is using something called thin provision. And what that means is that we gave it 64 gigabytes of storage to work with, but it's not going to take up 64 gigabytes on your actual file system in media. It's only going to take up that space as you start to use the virtual machine and put stuff onto its storage.

14:16Moving on down here in the CD DVD section, here's where we're going to want to insert that ISO image file that we downloaded from Microsoft's website right over here . So click on this radio button, click on browse. And right here, it's going to by default go to our virtual machine folder. So hot, I was actually going to show you separately. But here, here you can see, let's go ahead and click on all files. You can see what's in this folder right here.

14:48So we have a bunch of files. I'm not going to go into detail about what these files do. Just know that they all have to do with this virtual machine. So that wasn't unexpected detour. Let's go ahead and continue on to find our ISO file. So in this case, it's on my G drive and it's right here video demo folder and right here, Windows 11. So I'm going to click that and click on open and here you can see that now we 're using this ISO file, which is great.

15:21So the other thing we need to make sure is that this checkbox right here, connect power on is checked when the virtual machine is off, this button right here is going to be grayed out because it's not on. And so once the virtual machine actually turns on, this radio button connected right here is going to first not be grayed out. And second, because we've checked the box to connect the optical drive at power on, it's going to be checked at power.

15:53So going on down the last thing that we really have to consider is the network adapter. And specifically, it's going to be the mode of our network connection. So there's two main ones that you should consider. The first is going to be a net and that's the default option. This works if the only thing that you care about is going out from your virtual machine to the outside world, like to the internet, for example.

16:25But if you need the network to be able to access the virtual machine directly without the virtual machine reaching out first, that's where you would use the bridge option right here. The difference in a nutshell is that with bridge, the virtual machine looks like any other computer on the network to other devices on that network. But with now, the other devices on the network never know that there's a virtual machine. Because to them, the traffic from the virtual machine looks like it's coming from list computers IP address.

17:04So the actual physical hosts IP address. So just for this demo to keep it simple, I'm going to go ahead and stick with now. So no changes need to be made. The connect at power on is good to go. So I'm going to click on OK to save my changes. So now that we have all of our virtual machine settings all dialed in where we want them to be, in the next video, we're going to go ahead and actually start it up, boot it up and install Windows and make sure that everything is working.

17:37So I'll catch you over in the next video where we do that. In the meantime, this is informative for you and I'd like to thank you for viewing.

0:00So in the previous video, we created our virtual machine in VMware Workstation Player, and we mounted our Windows 11 installation media. And so now, all that's left to do is cross our fingers, if I can cross that finger right there, and pray that we can install Windows 11 on this virtual machine. Let's see if what we did actually work. So I've went ahead and maximized the Workstation Player window so that we can get a better view here.

0:32And what we're going to do is click right here to play virtual machine. And with this virtual machine selected, that's going to go ahead and boot up this virtual machine. And hopefully it's going to boot to our Windows 11 installation. So I'm going to click on play virtual machine and watch the magic happen. We can't watch too long though because with Windows, it's going to ask us to press any key to boot from the CD DVD. And I got a little excited there because it came a little faster than I expected.

1:07But now you can see that we're actually booting into Windows and there we are, the Windows setup. So this Windows installation, in fact I'm going to go through it right now as I 'm talking, it thinks that we are running on a physical system. So installing the operating system is no different than if you popped the Windows installation into a physical computer and went through this exact same process. Select the addition, click next, agree to the license terms, click next, custom mode, click next to install it on the only drive that we have.

1:45And this is not going to do anything to the files that are actually on our system because it's just installing Windows onto that virtual drive. And here we are. So installing Windows just like any other installation of Windows, except now we can drag this window out of the way. And you can see here's my actual Windows 11 system. So I'm running Windows 11 as a window, no pun intended, inside of my real hosts Windows 11 environment.

2:21So now you can see that the Windows installation is proceeding, just like it does on a regular computer. And this might actually take a while for me because the ISO image that we're using is on a different drive than the VM is actually stored on. So it has to go between two drives. That might take a little while depending on the hardware that you have that you're running virtual machines on, it might take a few minutes to get the installation here.

2:54So fortunately with the power of video editing, I have the power to not bore you to death. And all righty. So now we're on the Windows desktop of our CBT Nuggets demo Windows 11 virtual machine. So just to prove that this is the virtual machines desktop that we're looking at, I'm going to drag this out of the way. So here's my host Windows environment. And here's the Windows environment of our virtual machine.

3:25And in hindsight, I should have made sure beforehand that the ISO image for the Windows installation, as well as the virtual machine files were on the same drive because boy did that take a while. I got through no live two episodes of a TV show I'm going through before that finished. Anyway, my life story aside, there's one last thing that I want to do here.

3:56And it has to do with less wonky screen resolution. So I've maximized the VMware window and the screen resolution here is really, really small. And the reason for that is because the operating system that's running in here, remember, this Windows 11 guest or virtual machine right here doesn't know about VMware at all. So it doesn't know that we've maximized the window here.

4:28So the way that we're going to fix that is by installing a program on this virtual machine called VMware tools, what that's going to do is it's going to allow our virtual machine here and the actual VMware hypervisor to communicate. And that's going to allow us to do things like fix the screen resolution issue that I just mentioned, because a VM with VMware tools installed can automatically adjust its screen resolution to match the size of the VMware window.

5:05Some of the other things that it can do include shared folders. So the host file system can be exposed to the virtual machine so that the virtual machine can copy files back and forth from the host's actual file system. And there's a bunch of other creature comforts. Basically, it comes down to this. If the operating system that you're running in your virtual machine supports VMware tools, which in this case, Windows does, there's basically no disadvantage to installing VMware tools. So we're going to go ahead and do that real quick.

5:42So the process for that is actually really simple. So what I'm going to do here is firstly control alt. So that key combination releases my cursor from the virtual machine and back to controlling the actual host's operating system. So what I'm going to do is go up here, click on this player menu, go to manage and click on install VMware tools. So after clicking that button, you can see that this autoplay window came up and it actually just disappeared here. What it did is it mounted an ISO image in the optical drive of this virtual machine with the actual installer that we need to install VMware tools. So the important thing to keep in mind here is that whatever CV or DVD was in there previously, so as you might remember, in our case, it was the Windows installation ISO, whatever was in there, it's going to eject it and then put in its place the VMware tools installer ISO. So with the autoplay window gone, all we have to do to access it is go to our file explorer here, go to the DVD drive, which as you can see is VMware tools. And

7:01we are going to run the setup 64 for 64 bit installation. Click on yes for the UAC. And you can see here that the installer is launching. There we go. So the VMware tools setup is here. So we 're going to click through next and next and install. So the setup wizard has just completed. It was very fast, like 30 seconds. So when we click finish now, it's going to ask us to reboot because it installed a bunch of new drivers that have to take effect. So we'll click on yes to reboot the system.

7:35And while we're rebooting, it decided that now seems like a perfect time to apply Windows updates. Thanks, Windows. We'll be back when this is all done and dealt with. All right. So we are back here on the Windows login screen after a quick little reboot. So I'm just going to click here, type in our super secure password. I'm sure you can guess what the password is. All righty, let's go ahead and log it. So now we're back on the desktop here on our virtual machine. And let me go ahead and expand the tray here. So you can see here that VMware tools is installed and running. We can tell that because the icon for VMware tools is in our system tray here. It doesn't seem to be adjusting our screen resolution. Let me try something real quick.

8:29Let me try doing lists to readjust the window. And there we go. It just needed a little kick. So congratulations. If you've made it this far in your own environment, that means that you have a functioning Windows 11 virtual machine. So before we go on, give yourself a quick pat on the back. Now to verify that this virtual machine is actually set up the way that we want it to be set up, let's take a look at the resources that it has in task manager. Now normally you would control delete to get to task manager.

9:07But you don't want to do control delete on your actual keyboard because there is a chance that your host will intercept that control delete and give you the control delete for your actual host and not send it on to your virtual machine. So the way if you want to be safe that you should do a control delete in a virtual machine is a list button right here. So it's the button that's immediately to the right of the pause button here. And if we hover over it, you 'll see what it does.

9:40It sends a control delete to the virtual machine. So if we go ahead and press this right now, it simulates a control delete keystroke inside of the VM. So from here, let's go ahead and click on task manager to open that up. And ooh, new task manager interface. I think this is my first time seeing the new interface. Anyway, let's go ahead and go to performance here to check out our specifications. We will maximize the task manager window. And I'm not sure if you can see that, but it says that our virtual processor count is two. If you remember, if I go here to player and manage and virtual machine setting, we gave this for processor cores. But do keep in mind, our socket count is two. So really, it's two CPUs that's thinking of it as, and two times two is four. So it does have the correct number of virtual CPU cores assigned to it.

10:41It just splits it across two different CPUs from the virtual machine's perspective. And if we hop on over to memory here, we'll see that this is a gigabytes of RAM, which is let's open back our virtual machine settings, what we saw earlier here, memory, eight gigabytes. And while we're here, we'll check out two things about our storage, the first being that it's NVMe. So it's being presented to the virtual machine as an SSD. And of course, our maximum capacity being 64 gigabytes. So let's close out of this window again, and hop on to storage here, we'll see that this is an SSD right down here. That's where it says type SSD. And our capacity is 64 gigabytes. The other way that we can verify our capacity is to go to file explorer, and this PC. And if we look at our C drive right there, you'll see 62.2 gigabytes is our total size. There's some file system overhead there. So it's basically 64 gigabytes. And then the last thing that we're going to want to test here is our network

11:56connectivity. So if you remember, I configured this using the NAT option, which means that when it goes from the VM to the outside world, it's going to be using the IP address of my physical host. So if I go ahead and open up Microsoft Edge here, my physical computer has access to the internet. So let's go ahead and enter Google.com. And you'll see that from this virtual machine. Again, here's the proof virtual machine right here. And our host environment right here from inside our virtual machine, we have access to Google, we have access to the internet.

12:39Everything is working splendidly. So that's how simple deploying a virtual machine can be. Heck, you just did it right now. Or at the very least, you followed along with me as we did it together. In the meantime, I'm Elle, this is informative for you, and I'd like to thank you for viewing. [BLANK_AUDIO]