1. First of all, there should be an installation of the Server 2012 R2 available, without Hyper-V Feature enabled, and joined to a domain (as a plain, member server; FQDN resolving will be needed after the installation is started)
2. add .NET 3.5 to your Server
3. configure your LAN settings and enable Network Discovery
4. enable Desktop Experience feature (you'll need Flash)
5. update your Server installation, otherwise you'll get an error stating that the update is recommended because of known issues with the current TCP/IP
6. if you have VMware Workstation installed, disable the VM Sharing feature (it can be found within "Edit" -> "Preferences" -> "Shared VMs") or disable it and then change the port to non-default (for example: 444) value (if you still want to use it), otherwise there could be some problems with the ports later on
7. disable / suspend any AV before the installation starts, otherwise it could block some important installation scripts
8. run the vCenter 6 install - Embedded Deployment should be enough (for smaller systems, with only one vCenter Server)
9. before using the vSphere Web Client, make sure that your Domain Controller is accessible (otherwise you'll probably get client authentication errors and you won't be able to use the vCenter Server). Also, if you lose the connection to the DC or get these error(s) anyway, you can either restart the Windows Server (which is hosting the vCenter Server) or make sure that the DC is (re)connected, then restart all VMware services and restart the vSphere Web Client itself (please note that it usually takes a few minutes for it to start)
10. start the vSphere Web Client - as you can see (I'll assume here that you're logged in as a default local administrator), the Server won't let you run this (Modern UI, updated) Internet Explorer. To solve this, the following has to be done:
1. open the Local Security Policy (run: secpol.msc) and change the value marked in yellow below
2. open the Registry Editor (run: regedit.exe) and change the string to the value as pictured below (both marked in yellow)
3. restart your Windows Server
11. after restart, allow the Web Client a few minutes to start
If you prefer to use the classic IE, just copy the URL from the vSphere Web Client address bar.
12. in order to get less prompts and errors, i.e. to enable the Web Client to run freely, turn off the IE Enhanced Security Feature: open the Server Manager, click on "Local Server" on the left side, then find and disable IE Enhanced Security Configuration on the right side of the window (in the end its status should be "Off", at least for Administrators group). Additionally, add the vCenter Server to the "Trusted Zones" in the IE configuration and lower the security settings for this zone (if you get a certificate error after that, this can be ignored)
That should be it... 🙂