This book will become your assistant in the day-to-day administration of the VMware virtual environment with vCenter Server.
My goal was to make this book as practical as possible. Each chapter is focused on detailed steps on how to perform administrative tasks and implement solutions. The intention was to provide the minimum amount of theory, just enough to understand what a feature does and why it can be useful.
While there is no lack of literature about vCenter, this topic is quite broad and can't be completely covered in one book. The selection of advice and solutions included here has been made based on daily tasks I was challenged with during my work. So with high probability, most of these tasks will be useful for other administrators who work with vSphere and vCenter.
Also, one of the goals of this book was to make each recipe self-sufficient so that there is no need to read a bunch of other articles and tips to implement a particular feature or setting. That's why you will not be required to read each chapter from top to bottom. A reader should be able to open a particular device and implement the solution if it suits their requirements.
Easier recipes will be useful for administrators who are just starting to work with vCenter. More advanced administrators may benefit from solutions related to scripting and new features introduced in vSphere 5.
With Web Client, this became available in vSphere 5 and many administrators are just starting to learn it. As this transition is happening, I have focused my attention on both Web Client and traditional vSphere Client, unless it's a new feature that can be configured only in Web Client.
Finally, beside recipes with step-by-step instructions, there is general advice about NUMA and virtual CPUs more related to planning. The principles described here are important to keep in mind each time you create a new virtual machine.
Enjoy reading!
Chapter 1, vCenter Basic Tasks and Features, covers some basic solutions administrators may need to implement while working with vCenter.
Chapter 2, Increasing Environment Availability, covers availability solutions offered by vCenter, including High Availability (HA), Fault Tolerance (FT), Admission Control, backup, and replication.
Chapter 3, Increasing Environment Scalability, describes vCenter features that can improve an administrator's efficiency. These features include templates, customizations, and host profiles.
Chapter 4, Improving Environment Efficiency, covers enhancements designed to improve an environment's efficiency.
Chapter 5, Optimizing Resource Usage, discovers options available to administrators to improve resource usage. These include Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and Storage DRS, VM shares, limits and reservations, and network and storage I/O control.
Chapter 6, Basic Administrative Tasks, covers administrative tasks that allow increasing an administrator's control and visibility in the environment.
Chapter 7, Improving Environment Manageability, includes advice to improve an environment's manageability by utilizing tags, new commands, netdump, virtual switch backup, and PowerCLI.
All recipes in this book assume that you already have vCenter deployed and that it already has some hosts and datastores connected. You may be running vCenter with a trial license, which will work just fine if you decide to try some of the solutions described. All features and settings mentioned in this book exist in any vSphere 5 version, unless otherwise noted.
VMware vCenter Cookbook is intended for system administrators who have some experience with virtualization and already use VMware vCenter. This book will be helpful for those looking for tips or shortcuts for common administration tasks as well as work-arounds for pain points of vSphere administration.
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: "Locate the image profile using the Get-EsxImageProfile cmdlet."
Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$targetHost = "esxi6" New-VM -vmhost $targetHost ...
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: " To do that, close the current dialog and click on Enable VM Storage policies per compute resource icon, select a cluster from the list, and click on Enable."
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