vSphere Virtual Machine Administration - VMware Documentation

vSphere Virtual Machine Administration
Select the Virtual Machine Name and Folder
When you create a virtual machine, you provide a unique name for it. The unique name distinguishes it
from existing virtual machines in the virtual machine folder or datacenter. The name can contain up to 80
characters. You can select a datacenter or folder location for the virtual machine, depending on your
organizational needs.
Folders provide a way to store virtual machines for different groups in an organization, and you can set
permissions on them. For a flatter hierarchy, you can put all virtual machines and templates in a datacenter
and organize them a different way.
The virtual machine name determines the name of the virtual machine files and folder on the disk. For
example, if you name the virtual machine win8, the virtual machine files are named win8.vmx, win8.vmdk,
win8.nvram, and so on. If you change the virtual machine name, the names of the files on the datastore do
not change.
Procedure
1 Type a name for the virtual machine.
2 Select or search for the datacenter or folder in which to deploy the virtual machine.
3 Click Next.
Select a Resource
When you deploy a virtual machine, you select the host, cluster, vApp, or resource pool for the virtual
machine to run in. The virtual machine will have access to the resources of the selected object.
For example, a virtual machine has access to the memory and CPU resources of the host on which it resides.
If you select a cluster for the virtual machine, and the administrator has configured the cluster to take
advantage of HA and DRS, the virtual machine will have a greater level of availability.
Procedure
1 Search or browse for the host, cluster, vApp, or resource pool for the virtual machine.
If deploying the virtual machine to the selected location might cause compatibility problems, the
problems appear at the bottom of the window.
2 Click Next.
Select a Datastore
Select the datastore or datastore cluster in which to store the virtual machine configuration files and all of
the virtual disks. Each datastore might have a different size, speed, availability, and other properties. The
available datastores are accessible from the destination resource that you selected.
On the Customize hardware page, you can configure the storage. For example, you can add a new hard
disk, apply a Virtual machine storage policy, or place the configuration and disk files on separate storage
devices.
The amount of free space in the datastore is always changing. Ensure that you leave sufficient space for
virtual machine creation and other virtual machine operations, such as growth of sparse files, snapshots,
and so on. To review space utilization for the datastore by file type, see the vSphere Monitoring and
Performance documentation.
22 VMware, Inc.