System Center 2016 is a comprehensive IT infrastructure, virtualization, and cloud management platform. With System Center 2016, you can easily and efficiently deploy, manage, and monitor a virtualized infrastructure, services, and applications across multiple hypervisors, as well as public and private cloud infrastructures, to deliver flexible and cost-effective IT services for your business.
This book has plenty of recipes to help you design, plan, and improve Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) deployment; integrate and manage the fabric (compute, storage, network controller, gateway, and networking), services, and resources; deploy different types of clusters; configure integration with the operations manager and Windows Azure Pack; and carry out vital tasks quickly and easily.
This book is essentially intended at system engineers, solution architects, administrators and anyone who wants to learn and master VMM 2016. If you are not familiar with VMM, don't worry. Start from the beginning, and the book will also help you to get insight into the virtualization platform, its management, and other techniques related to the private cloud.
Chapter 1, VMM 2016 Architecture, provides an understanding of the VMM modular architecture, which is useful when designing VMM and troubleshooting deployment. This chapter also covers all the requirements that must be satisfied to make a private cloud.
Chapter 2, Upgrading from Previous Versions, walks you through all the necessary steps to upgrade the previous version of VMM to the new VMM 2016, covering its database, highly available configurations, and post-upgrade tasks.
Chapter 3, Installing VMM 2016, focuses on deploying VMM and its dependencies. It also gives plenty of tips and tricks to install and automate VMM and SQL Server deployments in both Windows Server Core and Full environments.
Chapter 4, Installing a High Available VMM Server, dives into more advanced VMM configuration, and provides an understanding of how VMM has become a critical part of the private cloud infrastructure. You will also learn how to make a highly available library server and VMM configuration database.
Chapter 5, Configuring Fabric Resources in VMM, discusses building a new fabric in VMM by configuring compute, storage, and networking resources. It starts by adding host groups and ends by creating a hyper-converged cluster with Storage Spaces Direct and Hyper-V. It also covers the deployment of a network controller providing a good starting point for network virtualization implementation.
Chapter 6, Configuring Guarded Fabric in VMM, walks you through the recipes to help protect confidential data by deploying new shielded VMs as a part of a Guarded Fabric consisting of Guarded Hosts and a Host Guardian Service. It also discusses how to convert existing VMs to shielded and manage them through VMM.
Chapter 7, Deploying Virtual Machines and Services, provides information to help the administrator to create, deploy, and manage private clouds, virtual machines, templates, and services in VMM 2016; it provides recipes to assist you in getting the most of our deployment.
Chapter 8, Managing VMware ESXi Hosts, shows you how to manage and make VMware resources available to private cloud deployments. It also covers converting VMware machines to Hyper-V (V2V), deploying virtual machines and templates, all from the VMM console.
Chapter 9, Managing Clouds, Fabric Updates, Resources, Cluster and the New Features of 2016, covers other new features of VMM 2016 such as Cluster OS Rolling upgrade and Production Checkpoints. You will also learn how to integrate VMM 2016 with Windows Azure Pack for VM cloud management.
Chapter 10, Integration with System Center Operations Manager 2016, guides you through the steps required to complete integration of SCOM 2016 with VMM in order to enable monitoring of the private cloud infrastructure.
This book assumes a medium level of expertise on Windows Server and Hyper-V, basic knowledge on cloud computing and networking, and a moderate experience with PowerShell. To evaluate all the recipes in the book, you will need System Center 2016 Virtual Machine Manager, SQL Server (2016 version is used throughout the book), as a minimum requirement. The book also covers integration with VMware vCenter 6.0; therefore, you need to have it deployed beforehand. Although the recipes provide exceptional step-by-step guides, prepare Windows Azure Pack, Service Provider Foundation, and System Center Operations Manager 2016 media files at least.
Actually, some of the chapters were made in Azure, and you can also use public IaaS services and its free trial to deploy and check some of the explained scenarios. In addition, Azure is required if you plan to protect virtual machines via the Azure Site Recovery service.
We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/SystemCenter2016VirtualMachineManagerCookbookThirdEdition_ColorImages.pdf.
There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.
CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "In addition, it will add the ApplicationFrameworks folder to the library share."
A block of code is set as follow
;SQL Server 2016 Configuration File [OPTIONS] ; SQL Server License Terms IAcceptSQLServerLicenseTerms="True" ; Setup Work Flow: INSTALL, UNINSTALL, or UPGRADE. ACTION="Install"
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
;SQL Server 2016 Configuration File
[OPTIONS]
; SQL Server License Terms
IAcceptSQLServerLicenseTerms="True"
; Setup Work Flow: INSTALL, UNINSTALL, or UPGRADE.
ACTION="Install" Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
Set-ItemProperty -Path 'HKLM:SoftwareMicrosoftMicrosoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager ServerSetup' -Name VmmServicePrincipalNames -Value "SCVMM/vmm-mgmt01,SCVMM/vmm- mgmt01.rllab.com"
Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "Launch the SQL Server setup and choose the New SQL Server failoverclusterinstallation option."
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