This book is structured in three main parts, starting with a high-level approach, then going in deep on configuration and management aspects, and finally with some aspects related to the maintaining.

Chapter 1, Evolution of VMware vSphere Suite, provides a general overview of all the products, solutions, and features of the vSphere 6.5 suite, comparing the evolutions with the previous releases. Also, this chapter explains the reasons to choose (and why not to choose) vSphere 6.5 compared with previous versions or other products. Finally, it includes a general overview of all the products, solutions, and features in other VMware products and different suites that could be complementary or where vSphere represents an infrastructural foundation.

Chapter 2, Design and Plan a Virtualization Infrastructure, explains how to approach a virtualization project using reference architectures and best practices, from the analysis of requirements, constraints, and risks to the different types of design (conceptual, logical, and physical). Network and storage aspects are discussed, as well as different vCenter Server and ESXi design and planning aspects. Three different scenarios are used as examples—SMB, Enterprise, and ROBO.

Chapter 3, Analysis and Assessment of an Existing Environment, explains how to analyse and assess an existing physical or virtual environment in order to gain the data needed to plan a migration, upgrade, or improvement. Different tools and approaches will be described as ways to reach this goal.

Chapter 4, Deployment Workflow and Component Installation, starts with network and storage requirements, host and environment preparation, and then the different ways to install ESXi, including Auto Deploy and other solutions for deploying the host part. It also details the deployment of PSC, vCenter Server, and other components, including vCSA solutions and specific features and capabilities of the new version, 6.5.

Chapter 5, Configuring and Managing vSphere 6.5, describes the different ways to manage a vSphere 6.5 infrastructure, including the new HTML5 clients, with an introduction to the scripting and automation tools. ESXi, vCenter, VMware cluster-related configuration, and management topics are also covered in this part.

Chapter 6, Advanced Network Management, is dedicated to virtual networking, both with standard and distributed virtual switches and covers the design, management, and optimization of the virtual networks. A brief introduction to new network trends, including NV, NFV, SDS, and how NSX could improve a vSphere environment is also given.

Chapter 7, Advanced Storage Management, is dedicated to the storage part of a virtual infrastructure. Starting from local block-based storage and moving on to shared block storage with FC, FCoE, and iSCSI protocols and NFS-based NAS storage. For each of them, we consider different optimization techniques, integration, and storage features provided by vSphere. Other types of storage architectures are also considered, especially HCI solutions. Storage caching and new types of storage, such as virtual NVMe devices, are also covered.

Chapter 8, Advanced VM and Resource Management, introduces the practices and procedures involved in configuring and managing of VMs in a vSphere infrastructure. Different types of VM provisioning are considered, including templates, Content Library, VA, and vApps. This chapter will also provide a comprehensive view of vSphere resources management, including reservations, limits, and shares, and how to balance and optimize them in your environment. Finally, we discuss the different migration techniques to move your workload across different environments.

Chapter 9, Monitoring, Optimizing, and Troubleshooting, covers the native tools used for monitor and troubleshoot performance and other issues in order to improve the VM and the workloads. The chapter focuses on monitoring different critical resources, such as computing, storage, and networking across the ESXi hosts, the resource pools, and clusters. Other tools, such as vRealize Operations and third-party tools, are also briefly described.

Chapter 10, Securing and Protecting Your Environment, explains that, in addition to the security and hardening aspects of vSphere, the new 6.5 version introduces some new, important features related to this aspect, such as VM Encryption, Encrypted vMotion, Secure Boot Support for VMs, and Secure Boot Plus Cryptographic Hypervisor Assurance for ESXi. In addition, vSphere 6.5 introduces audit-quality logging for vSphere events.

Chapter 11, Lifecycle Management, Patching, and Upgrading, explains that with vSphere 6.5, administrators will find significantly more powerful capabilities for patching, upgrading, and managing the configuration of the VM using Update Manager and host profile features. We will also cover the upgrade path and consideration to upgrade or migrate your VM.

Chapter 12, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery, describes what's behind normal operation and maintenance in order to define your business continuity requirements and match your expected service levels. Availability, SLA, data and system protection, disaster recovery, and other basics concepts are described in this chapter, with a brief introduction of SRM and SR as a solution for DR.

Chapter 13, Advanced Availability in vSphere 6.5, focuses on specific availability (and resiliency) solutions in vSphere, including the new vSphere High Availability (HA) features, proactive HA, vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT), and other solutions, such as guest clustering.

Chapter 14, Data and Workloads Protection, provides some information on how to save your configuration, data, and workload from your virtual infrastructure. VMware is discontinuing VMware vSphere Data Protection (VDP), a general-purpose backup product included with vSphere, making the related ecosystem the proper way to manage those aspects.