I have been trying to install Windows Server 2012 Essentials on my ESXi box and I just can't get it to work.
My physical machine is a HP MicroServer N40L with 8GB ram.
I have installed VMWare onto an 8GB USB pen drive and the 250GB disk that comes with the Microserver is used to store the Virtual Machines and Disks.
I have three other drives (2Tb, 1Tb and a 0.5Tb drive) that will be used for data storage within my VMs.
I have setup a linux based VM (VortexBox) that is running fine.
Now I am trying to setup my second VM which is Windows Server 2012 Essentials.
I have created a VM that is based on:
Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit (as I have heard the Windows 2012 doesn't work that well)
3 GB Ram
100Gb disk
E1000 NIC
Now the installation process gets to the "Updating and preparing your server" part it sits at 100% and nothing happens.
If I Ctrl-alt-del I can get to the task manager and kill setupmon.exe and I get the desktop but I cannot do much as (ie open the dashboard) I get messages saying you need to setup Windows 2012 Essentials first.
I noticed that the network was not connected so I sorted that out by entering the IP gateway and then disabling/renabling the network.
Then I go a message that a driver was missing and that I should install VMWare Tools. So I did this.
Then I rebooted and ran SetupMon.exe manually as it did not automatically start. Now it has got past 100% but shows an error:
It was suggested (on a Microsoft forum) that the VM is not seeing my NIC properly.
Any ideas?