Users Guide
Deploying vSphere 6.5.x
Important information
For all the Dell EMC PowerEdge servers with factory-installed VMware ESXi operating system:
• VMware vSphere 6.x supports NVMe hotplug when the IOMMU Interrupt Remapping (ID) option is disabled on AMD
EPYC(Rome) based ReadyNodes. For more information, see VMware Knowledge Base article 74726.
• The username for Dell EMC PowerEdge yx4x servers is root and password is the Service Tag of your system followed by the
character '!'.
NOTE: To locate the Service Tag of your system, see Locating Service Tag of your system.
• Dell EMC PowerEdge yx3x servers do not have a password for the username root.
For the Dell EMC PowerEdge servers with factory-installed VMware ESXi operating system on the BOSS-S1 device:
• Dell EMC PowerEdge yx4x servers do not have VMFS datastore that is enabled by default. It is recommended that you use the BOSS-
S1 device as an OS boot device and vSphere ESXi Logging device. For more information, see VMware Knowledge Base article
2145210.
• Dell EMC PowerEdge yx4x server supports ESXi installation on the Non-RAID logical unit number (LUN) or passthrough hard disk
drives (HDDs) or the Solid State Drives (SSDs) or BOSS-S1 device or IDSDM.
• Dell EMC PowerEdge yx4x server supports ESXi installation on an On-board SATA controller in AHCI mode.
• It is recommended that you use the latest BIOS versions that are listed at Dell.com/support/home for the Dell EMC PowerEdge
servers.
• Dell EMC’s PowerEdge yx3x server supports the ESXi installation on the Non-RAID logical unit number (LUN) or passthrough Hard
disk drives (HDDs) or the Solid State Drives (SSDs) or IDSDM.
• Dell EMC’s PowerEdge yx3x server supports the ESXi installation on an On-board SATA controller in AHCI mode.
• PowerEdge servers that are shipped with Intel Xeon E5-26xx series processor and later versions support Intel Trusted Execution
Technology (TXT) with the latest shipping BIOS.
• You cannot automatically preactivate the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and later versions of operating system that is installed on
virtual machines by using the product activation code in the Dell EMC OEM installation media. Use a virtual product key to activate the
guest operating system. For more information, see the Dell EMC OEM Windows Server 2008 Installation on Virtual Machines Using
Dell EMC OEM Media white paper at www.dell.com/downloads/global/solutions/WS08_Media_VM_Final.pdf.
• The ESXi image that is preinstalled on your PowerEdge server may not contain all the drivers that are required for peripherals. More
drivers must be installed to enable certain add-on peripherals. You can download the drivers from www.downloads.vmware.com.
• ESXi does not support storage LUN exposed from On-board SATA Controller with Software RAID.
• vSphere 6.5.x supports booting ESXi hosts in Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) mode. With UEFI, systems can be booted
with ESXi from local hard drives, CD/DVD drives, or USB media.
• On Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) enabled systems installed with ESXi, It is recommended that you populate all processor
nodes with similar memory to enable balanced distribution of memory across nodes. With unbalanced memory distribution across
nodes, you may face performance degradation issues or ESXi may fail to boot.
NOTE:
For more information about NUMA, see the VMware Knowledge Base articles:
kb.vmware.com/kb/1003690
and
kb.vmware.com/kb/1570
. Also, see the VMware's resource management guide for vSphere 6.5.x at
www.VMware.com/support/pubs.
• ESXi 6.5.x requires a minimum system memory of 8 GB on all supported servers. However, on some Dell EMC PowerEdge servers
with 4 GB, all the available memory is not allocated to the ESXi installer. This may result in an installation failure. Ensure more than 4
GB RAM is installed. For optimal memory configuration on the Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, see the Server Owner’s Manual.
• To enable the Virtualization Technology (VT) feature, select System Setup, and then select Processor.
NOTE: To run 64-bit virtual machines on Intel processor-based servers, you must enable the VT feature.
Topics:
• vSphere configuration using Dell EMC Fibre Channel SAN
• vSphere configuration using iSCSI SAN
• Booting ESXi
• Configuring the password
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