With more and more data centers being virtualized using its technologies, VMware is still the undisputed leader in providing virtualization solutions ranging from server virtualization to storage and network virtualization. Despite the efforts from Citrix and Microsoft, VMware's vSphere product line is still the most feature-rich and futuristic in the virtualization industry. Knowing how to install and configure the latest vSphere components is important to give yourself a head start towards virtualization using VMware. This book covers the installation and upgrade of the vSphere environment and also the administration tasks that one would commonly need to handle when managing a VMware infrastructure.
VMware vSphere 5.5 Cookbook is a task-oriented, fast-paced, practical guide to installing and configuring vSphere 5.5 components. It will take you through all of the steps required to accomplish various configuration tasks with less reading. Most of the tasks are accompanied with relevant screenshots and flowcharts with the intention to provide visual guidance as well. The book concentrates more on the actual task rather than the theory around it, making it easier to understand what is really needed to achieve the task. However, most of the concepts have been well described to help you understand the background and working.
The main highlight of this book is the use of the vSphere 5.5 Web Client to accomplish most tasks. Although a few tasks cannot be accomplished using the new Web Client with the current vSphere version, VMware will be integrating them into the Web Client in its future product releases. The other highlights include chapters covering vSphere Host Profiles, vSphere Auto Deploy, ESXi Image Builder, and VMware Update Manager. This book also covers command-line methods for important tasks.
Chapter 1, Upgrading to vSphere 5.5, discusses the procedures involved in upgrading an existing vSphere infrastructure to vSphere 5.5. It covers upgrading the vCenter Server, the ESXi host, and the virtual machine tools and virtual machine hardware.
Chapter 2, Performing a New Installation of vSphere 5.5, walks you through the procedures involved in deploying a new vSphere 5.5 infrastructure. It covers the installation of ESXi, vCenter Server, and the deployment of the vCenter Server virtual appliance.
Chapter 3, Using vSphere Host Profiles, covers the use of Host Profiles to create, manage, and use ESXi host configuration templates.
Chapter 4, Using ESXi Image Builder, walks you through the process of creating, managing, and applying image profiles to ESXi hosts.
Chapter 5, Using vSphere Auto Deploy, covers the procedures involved in forming an Auto Deploy infrastructure to enable faster provisioning of stateless or stateful ESXi hosts.
Chapter 6, Configuring vSphere Networking, explains how to set up and configure vSphere networking using vSphere Standard Switches and vSphere Distributed Switches. It covers advanced network configurations such as port mirroring, NetFlow, and the use of PVLANs.
Chapter 7, Creating and Managing VMFS Datastores, walks you through the process of creating and managing VMFS datastores. It also covers the use of datastore clusters and storage DRS.
Chapter 8, Managing iSCSI and NFS Datastores, covers the procedures involved in configuring and managing iSCSI and NSA storage on ESXi hosts.
Chapter 9, vSphere Storage Policies and Storage I/O Control, covers the use of storage policies to ensure that the VMs are placed in datastores categorized into different tiers and how to use storage I/O control to manage the I/O bandwidth between VMs running on them.
Chapter 10, Creating and Managing Virtual Machines, covers the procedures involved in creating and managing virtual machines in a vSphere infrastructure.
Chapter 11, Configuring vSphere HA, covers the configuration of high availability on ESXi clusters.
Chapter 12, Configuring vSphere DRS, DPM, and VMware EVC, covers the configuration of vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler, Distributed Power Management, and VMware Enhanced vMotion Compatibility on an ESXi cluster.
Chapter 13, Upgrading and Patching Using vSphere Update Manager, covers the installation and configuration of vSphere Update Manager and the Update Manager Download Service (UMDS) to manage patching and upgrading of ESXi hosts.
Chapter 14, Using vSphere Management Assistant, covers the deployment and configuration of vMA 5.5 to run commands/scripts remotely on ESXi.
Chapter 15, Monitoring the Performance of a vSphere Environment, covers different methods to monitor the performance of ESXi and virtual machines in a vSphere infrastructure.
You will learn about the software requirements for every vSphere component covered in this book in their respective chapters, but to start with a basic lab setup, you will need at least two ESXi hosts, a vCenter Server, a Domain Controller, a DHCP server, a DNS server, and a TFTP Server. For learning purposes, you don't really need to run ESXi on physical machines. You can use VMware Workstation to set up a hosted lab on your desktop PC or laptop, provided the machine has adequate compute and storage resources. For shared storage, you can use any of the free virtual storage appliances listed as follows:
Celerra UBER 3.2 can be downloaded at http://nickapedia.com/2010/10/04/play-it-again-sam-celerra-uber-v3-2/
OpenFiler can be downloaded at https://www.openfiler.com
HP StoreVirtual Storage can be downloaded at http://www8.hp.com/in/en/products/data-storage/storevirtual.html
This book is for anyone who wants to learn how to install and configure VMware vSphere components. It is an excellent handbook for administrators or for anyone looking for a head start in learning how to upgrade, install, and configure vSphere 5.5 components. It is also a good task-oriented reference guide for consultants who design and deploy vSphere.
In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it…, How it works…, There's more…, and See also).
To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:
This section tells you what to expect in the recipe, and describes how to set up any software or any preliminary settings required for the recipe.
This section usually consists of a detailed explanation of what happened in the previous section.
This section consists of additional information about the recipe in order to make the reader more knowledgeable about the recipe.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The esxcfg-mpath command available at ESXi's command-line interface can be used to view the multipathing information corresponding to the LUN."
A block of code is set as follows:
https://<IP Address or FQDN>:9443/vsphere-client
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
esxcli storage filesystem list
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Navigate to Home | Hosts and Clusters. Click on the Cluster option and then click on Hosts."
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