Learning DevOps: Continuously Deliver Better Software

Creating a new guest

Virtualization offers you the ability to create new virtual guests quickly and easily on the underlying ESXi host. You can create your hosts using a GUI, but it's possible to define and create hosts entirely from the command line.

This recipe shows you how to achieve this by creating a VMware configuration file and importing it using the ESXi shell.

Getting ready

You'll need an ESXi host that has SSH enabled.

How to do it...

Let's create a new guest using SSH onto your ESXi host:

1. SSH onto your ESXi host, and change directory to your default data store using the following command:

   cd /vmfs/volumes/datastore1
   

2. Next, you need to create a place to hold the VM files. You can do this by using the mkdir command:

   mkdir examplevm
   

3. Now, you ...