VMware vSphere 6.5 Cookbook - Third Edition

By : Abhilash G B, Cedric Rajendran

VMware vSphere 6.5 Cookbook - Third Edition

By: Abhilash G B, Cedric Rajendran

Overview of this book

VMware vSphere is a complete and robust virtualization product suite that helps transform data centers into simplified on-premises cloud infrastructures, providing for the automation and orchestration of workload deployment and life cycle management of the infrastructure. This book focuses on the latest release of VMware vSphere and follows a recipe-based approach, giving you hands-on instructions required to deploy and manage a vSphere environment. The book starts with the procedures involved in upgrading your existing vSphere infrastructure to vSphere 6.5, followed by deploying a new vSphere 6.5 environment. Then the book delves further into the procedures involved in managing storage and network access to the ESXi hosts and the virtual machines running on them. Moving on, the book covers high availability and fair distribution/utilization of clustered compute and storage resources. Finally, the book covers patching and upgrading the vSphere infrastructure using VUM, certificate management using VMCA, and finishes with a chapter covering the tools that can be used to monitor the performance of a vSphere infrastructure.

Free Chapter

Upgrading to vSphere 6.5

Introduction

vSphere 6.5 core components

Planning vSphere upgrade

Upgrading from vSphere 5.5 or 6.0 to vSphere 6.5

Upgrading vCenter Server running Microsoft Windows

Using the vCenter 6.5 Migration Assistant

Upgrading vCenter Server – Migrating from Microsoft Windows to VCSA

Upgrading the vCenter Server Appliance

Upgrading ESXi Hypervisor

Greenfield Deployment of vSphere 6.5

Introduction

Deploying vSphere ESXi 6.5

Configuring ESXi Management Network

Deploying vCenter Server Appliance 6.5

Deploying External Platform Services controllers

Deploying vCenter Servers in Enhanced Linked Mode

Configuring SSO identity sources

Assigning users and groups to vCenter Server

Using vSphere Host Profiles

Introduction

Preparing a reference host

Creating Host Profiles

Attaching/detaching ESXi hosts to/from a Host Profile

Performing host customizations

Checking Host Profile compliance of ESXi host(s)

Scheduling Host Profile compliance checks

Remediating non-compliant ESXi hosts

Using Host Profiles to push a configuration change

Copying settings between Host Profiles

Exporting Host Profiles

Duplicating Host Profiles

Using ESXi Image Builder

Introduction

Enabling ESXi Image Builder service for vSphere Web Client GUI

Preparing an ESXi Image Builder CLI environment

Downloading an ESXi offline bundle

Importing a software depot

Creating an online software depot

Creating a custom depot

Creating image profiles using an existing image profile

Creating image profiles from scratch

Comparing image profiles

Moving image profiles between software depots

Exporting image profiles

Using vSphere Auto Deploy

Introduction

Enabling vSphere auto deploy service

Configuring TFTP server with the files required to PXE boot

Configuring the DHCP server to work with auto deploy

Preparing vSphere environment – create host profile, configure the deploy rules and activate them

Enabling stateless caching

Enabling stateful install

Using vSphere Standard Switches

Introduction

Creating a vSphere Standard Switch

Creating VMkernel interfaces on a vSphere Standard Switch

Creating custom VMkernel TCP/IP stacks

Creating virtual machine port groups on a vSphere Standard Switch

Managing the physical uplinks of a vSwitch

Configuring security, traffic shaping, teaming, and failover on a vSphere Standard Switch

Using vSphere Distributed Switches

Introduction

Creating a vSphere Distributed Switch

Connecting hosts to a vSphere Distributed Switch

Creating a vSphere Distributed port group

Managing physical adapter (vmnic) to dvUplink mappings

Migrating a virtual machine network from a vSphere Standard Switch (vSwitch ) to a vSphere Distributed Switch (dvSwitch)

Migrating VMkernel interfaces between vSphere Standard (vSwitch) and vSphere Distributed Switches (dvSwitch)

Creating additional VMkernel interfaces on a vSphere Distributed Switch (dvSwitch)

Creating a vSphere Distributed Switch backup

Restoring dvSwitch from a backup

Creating or importing a dvSwitch from a backup

Configuring security, traffic shaping, teaming, and failover on a dvSwitch

Configuring VLANs on a vSphere Standard or Distributed Switch

Configuring private VLANs on a dvSwitch

Configuring LAGs on a vSphere Distributed Switch

Creating user-defined network resource pools

Using port mirroring on a vSphere Distributed Switch

Enabling NetFlow on a vSphere Distributed Switch

Creating and Managing VMFS Datastore

Introduction

Viewing the LUNs presented to an ESXi host

Viewing datastores available on an ESXi host

Creating a VMFS datastore

Managing multipathing configuration of a VMFS datastore

Expanding or growing a VMFS datastore

Extending a VMFS datastore

Unmounting and detaching VMFS volumes

Re-mounting a VMFS datastore

Deleting VMFS datastores

Upgrading from VMFS 5 to VMFS 6

Managing VMFS volumes detected as snapshots

Masking paths to a LUN

Unmasking paths to a LUN

Managing Access to the iSCSI and NFS Storage

Introduction

Adding the software iSCSI adapter

Configuring iSCSI multipathing using port binding

Configuring access to an iSCSI target server

Creating NFSv3 datastores

Creating NFSv4.1 datastores with Kerberos authentication

Storage IO Control, Storage DRS, and Profile Driven Storage

Introduction

Settings disk shares on virtual machine disks

Enabling Storage I/O Control (SIOC)

Integrating a VASA provider with the vCenter Server

Using vCenter tags to define storage capabilities

Creating VM storage policies

Assigning VM storage policies

Creating and Managing Virtual Machines

Introduction

Creating a virtual machine

Creating a new hard disk for a virtual machine

Adding an existing disk to a virtual machine

Attaching a Raw Device Mapping to a virtual machine

Mapping a virtual machine's vNIC to a different port group

Creating virtual machine snapshots

Deleting a virtual machine snapshot

Restoring a snapshot in linear snapshot tree

Switching to an arbitrary virtual machine snapshot

Consolidating snapshots

Converting a virtual machine to a template

Cloning a virtual machine to template

Exporting to an OVF template

Deploying a virtual machine from an OVF template

Creating a local content library

Creating a subscribed content library

Configuring vSphere 6.5 High Availability

Introduction

Enabling vSphere HA on a cluster

Configuring vSphere HA Admission Control

Setting the host isolation response for a HA cluster

Setting the VM restart priority for a HA cluster

Configuring VM monitoring

Configuring datastore heartbeating

Disabling host monitoring

Configuring vCenter Native High Availability

Configuring vSphere DRS, DPM, and VMware EVC

Introduction

Enabling vSphere DRS on a cluster

Configuring VMware Enhanced vMotion compatibility

Choosing a DRS automation level

Overriding the cluster automation level for a VM

Setting a migration threshold

Creating DRS VM or host groups

Creating VMs to host affinity rules

Creating VM affinity or anti-affinity rules

Configuring Distributed Power Management

Configuring Predictive DRS

Upgrading and Patching using vSphere Update Manager

Introduction

Installing vSphere Update Manager on Windows

Activating vSphere Update Manager in vCenter Server Appliance

Installing the Update Manager download service

Configuring VUM with a download source

Creating a custom baseline

Creating a baseline group

Importing an ESXi image and updating a host

Leveraging a VM/VA baseline to remediate a VM/VA

Using vSphere Certificate Manager Utility

Introduction

Regenerating a new VMCA Root Certificate and replacing all certificates

Generating certificate signing requests with the vSphere Certificate Manager

Replacing all certificates with custom certificate

Reverting the last performed operation by republishing old certificates

Resetting all certificates

Using vSphere Management Assistant

Introduction

Deploying the vMA appliance

Preparing VMware vMA for first use

Configuring VMware vMA to join an existing domain

Adding vCenter to vMA with AD authentication

Adding vCenter to vMA with fastpass (fpauth) authentication

Adding an ESXi host to vMA

Changing the authentication policy

Running CLI commands on target servers

Performance Monitoring in a vSphere Environment

Introduction

Using esxtop to monitor performance

Exporting and importing esxtop configurations

Running esxtop in the batch mode

Gathering VM I/O statistics using vscsiStats

Using vCenter performance graphs

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Upgrading ESXi Hypervisor

Once you have vCenter Server upgraded to version 6.5, the next step is to upgrade the ESXi hosts. The upgrade procedure will depend on the current deployment architecture. For instance, if all your ESXi hosts were deployed using the VMware Auto Deploy server, then you'll have to update the image profile sourcing the streamed image using a new offline bundle. As Auto Deploy is covered in Chapter 5, Using vSphere Auto Deploy, in this chapter, we will cover the upgrade of the ESXi host using the installation media. VMware ESXi can also be upgraded by running the ESXi installer on each of the servers or use vSphere Update Manager to perform the same activity. You will learn about patching/upgrading ESXi hosts using VUM in Chapter 14, Upgrading and Patching using vSphere Update Manager.

Getting ready

Before you begin any upgrade, it is very important to plan for it. So what would you need to do to perform an upgrade of ESXi? You would, of course, need the ISO image downloaded from VMware's website, but you would also need a method to present the ISO to the physical machine so that it can boot from it. Most of the modern server equipment's have a methodology to avoid the need to burn ISO to a physical DVD medium and then insert it into the DVD drive of the physical machine. If you are an administrator, you might already be aware of terms such as ILO (HP), DRAC (Dell), and KVM Manager (Cisco). These are web-based tools that will connect to an RAC on the server and enable remote access to the server's console via the Web. Enough said on what is available out there; let's make a list of what you need to begin the upgrade:

The ESXi 6.5 Hypervisor ISO image can be downloaded from VMware's downloads page https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/downloads
Access to the remote console of the server on which the upgrade will be performed

How to do it...

The following procedure will walk you through the steps involved in upgrading ESXi 5.5/6.0 to ESXi 6.5 using the ESXi installer:

Boot the host with the ESXi 6.5 installer ISO mapped to it.
Choose ESXi 6.5 standard installer from the boot menu and press Enter:

Once the installer is fully loaded into the memory, you will be prompted with a Welcome to the VMware ESXi 6.5.0 Installation screen. Now press Enter to continue.
To accept the EULA and continue, press the function key F11.
Select the storage device that has the previous installation of ESXi and press F1 to view the disk details:

On pressing F1, it will show you the Disk Details. In this case, it has detected an ESXi 6.0 installation. Press Enter to go back to the Select a Disk to Install or Upgrade screen:

At the Select a Disk to Install or Upgrade window, press Enter to continue.
On the ESXi and VMFS Found window, select the option Upgrade ESXi, preserve VMFS datastore and press Enter to continue:

On the Confirm Upgrade window, select the Upgrade option by pressing the F11 key:

If the upgrade completes successfully, you will be presented with an Upgrade Complete success window. Now press Enter to reboot the ESXi host.
After a reboot, you should be able to see the ESXi 6.5 DCUI welcome screen.

You should now be able to connect to this vCenter using the embedded host client as well. If the host was managed by a vCenter, then the inventory should now show this ESXi host connected.

There is more...

Once you have vCenter and Update Manager upgraded and configured for use, the ESXi host upgrades can be performed using VUM in a much more effective manner. You will be able to run the upgrades simultaneously on more than one ESXi host using VUM remediation. You will learn more about this in Chapter 14, Upgrading and Patching using vSphere Update Manager.

It is important to note that although there are means to retain your Microsoft Windows servers to run the vCenter components, there is no longer a compelling reason to do so. The vCenter Server Appliance is the way ahead, and you need not be surprised to see VMware completely removing the dependency on Microsoft OS or external databases in its future releases.

VMware vSphere 6.5 Cookbook - Third Edition

By : Abhilash G B, Cedric Rajendran

VMware vSphere 6.5 Cookbook - Third Edition

By: Abhilash G B, Cedric Rajendran

Overview of this book

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