Book Image

VMware vSphere 6.5 Cookbook - Third Edition

By : Abhilash G B, Cedric Rajendran

Book Image

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

Upgrading to vSphere 6.5

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

Greenfield Deployment of vSphere 6.5

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

Using vSphere Host Profiles

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

Using ESXi Image Builder

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

Using vSphere Auto Deploy

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

Using vSphere Standard Switches

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

Using vSphere Distributed Switches

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

Creating and Managing VMFS Datastore

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

Managing Access to the iSCSI and NFS Storage

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

Storage IO Control, Storage DRS, and Profile Driven Storage

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

Creating and Managing Virtual Machines

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

Configuring vSphere 6.5 High Availability

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

Configuring vSphere DRS, DPM, and VMware EVC

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

Upgrading and Patching using vSphere Update Manager

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

Using vSphere Certificate Manager Utility

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

Using vSphere Management Assistant

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

Performance Monitoring in a vSphere Environment

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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Introduction

The goal of this chapter is to help you understand and execute the process of upgrading your core vSphere infrastructure to VMware vSphere 6.5. The core includes your ESXi Hypervisor, vCenter Server, and vCenter Server's components. The upgrade of the third layer products that leverage the core vSphere infrastructure, such as vCloud Director and VMware Horizon View, are not covered in this chapter as they are beyond the scope and purpose of this book.

Before we begin, let me introduce you to the core infrastructure components that will be upgraded:

VMware vCenter Server: The viability of an upgrade or the need for a new build will depend on the current version of vCenter and the supported upgrade path.
vCenter Single Sign-On: These are authentication components. They will come into the picture if you are upgrading from vSphere 5.5 to 6.5.
vCenter Inventory Service: This is no longer a separate service in vCenter 6.5.
vSphere Web Client: This can be upgraded if the current version is 5.5; if not, it will be a new installation of this component.
vSphere Platform Service Controller (PSC): If you are upgrading from vSphere 6.0 to 6.5, you will need to review the current deployment model and apply an apt strategy to upgrade PSC.
vSphere Update Manager: VUM should be updated to the latest version before it can be used to upgrade ESXi hosts managed by the vCenter VUM is integrated with. VUM components are now built-in to the vCenter Appliance.
vSphere Auto Deploy: This is a requirement to upgrade vSphere Auto Deploy to the same version of vCenter Server.
VMware ESXi: This can be upgraded by booting the server using the ISO image, using vSphere Update Manager, or updating the image profile if the existing servers are auto-deployed.