Book Image

VMware vSphere 6.7 Cookbook - Fourth Edition

By : Abhilash G B
Book Image

VMware vSphere 6.7 Cookbook - Fourth Edition

By: Abhilash G B

Overview of this book

VMware vSphere is the most comprehensive core suite of SDDC solutions on the market. It helps transform data centers into simplified on-premises private cloud infrastructures. This edition of the book focuses on the latest version, vSphere 6.7. The books starts with chapters covering the greenfield deployment of vSphere 6.7 components and the upgrade of existing vSphere components to 6.7. You will then learn how to configure storage and network access for a vSphere environment. Get to grips with optimizing your vSphere environment for resource distribution and utilization using features such as DRS and DPM, along with enabling high availability for vSphere components using vSphere HA, VMware FT, and VCHA. Then, you will learn how to facilitate large-scale deployment of stateless/stateful ESXi hosts using Auto Deploy. Finally, you will explore how to upgrade/patch a vSphere environment using vSphere Update Manager, secure it using SSL certificates, and then monitor its performance with tools such as vSphere Performance Charts and esxtop. By the end of this book, you'll be well versed in the core functionalities of vSphere 6.7 and be able to effectively deploy, manage, secure, and monitor your environment.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Deploying a New vSphere 6.7 Infrastructure, walks you through the procedures involved in deploying a new vSphere 6.7 infrastructure. It covers the installation of ESXi and the deployment of the vCenter Server virtual appliance.

Chapter 2, Planning and Executing the Upgrade of vSphere, discusses the procedures involved in upgrading an existing vSphere infrastructure to vSphere 6.7. It covers upgrading vCenter Server and the ESXi hosts.

Chapter 3, Configuring Network Access Using vSphere Standard Switches, explains how to set up and configure vSphere networking using vSphere Standard Switches.

Chapter 4, Configuring Network Access Using vSphere Distributed Switches, explains how to set up and configure vSphere networking using vSphere Distributed Switches. It covers advanced network configurations such as port mirroring, NetFlow, and the use of PVLANs.

Chapter 5, Configuring Storage Access for Your vSphere Environment, walks you through the procedures involved in configuring access to Fiber Channel, iSCSI and NFS storage for the ESXi hosts.

Chapter 6, Creating and Managing VMFS Datastores, walks you through the procedures involved in creating and managing VMFS datastores.

Chapter 7, SIOC, Storage DRS, and Profile-Driven Storage, covers the use of storage policies to ensure that the virtual machines (VMs) are placed in datastores categorized into different capability tiers, using SIOC to enable balanced I/O between VMs running on different hosts, and using Storage DRS to cluster datastores for I/O load balancing.

Chapter 8, 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 9, Achieving High Availability in a vSphere Environment, covers the concepts and configuration of high availability for vSphere components – the ESXi host (vSphere HA), the VM (VMware FT), and vCenter Server (VCHA).

Chapter 10, Achieving Configuration Compliance Using vSphere Host Profiles, covers the use of host profiles to create, manage, and use ESXi host configuration templates.

Chapter 11, Building Custom ESXi Images Using Image Builder, covers using Image Profiles to customize ESXi images.

Chapter 12, Auto-Deploying Stateless and Stateful ESXi Hosts, covers the procedures involved in standing up a vSphere Auto Deploy infrastructure to enable faster provisioning of stateless or stateful ESXi hosts.

Chapter 13, Creating and Managing Virtual Machines, covers essential virtual machine administration tasks.

Chapter 14, Upgrading and Patching Using vSphere Update Manager, covers the configuration of vSphere Update Manager and the Update Manager Download Service to update/patch ESXi hosts.

Chapter 15, Securing vSphere Using SSL Certificates, teaches you how to secure communication between the vSphere components and its endpoints using SSL certificates.

Chapter 16, Monitoring the vSphere Infrastructure, covers a high-level overview of the essential tools used to monitor the performance of ESXi and VMs in a vSphere infrastructure.