Book Image

VMware vSphere 5.1 Cookbook

By : Abhilash G B
Book Image

VMware vSphere 5.1 Cookbook

By: Abhilash G B

Overview of this book

Amidst all the recent competition from Citrix and Microsoft, VMware's vSphere product line is still the most feature rich and futuristic product in the virtualization industry. Knowing how to install and configure vSphere components is important to give yourself a head start towards virtualization using VMware. If you want to quickly grasp the installation and configuration procedures, especially by using the new vSphere 5.1 web client, this book is for you.VMware vSphere 5.1 Cookbook will take you through all the steps required to accomplish a task with minimal reading required. Most of the tasks are accompanied with relevant screenshots with an intention to provide a visual guidance as well.The book has many useful recipes that will help you progress through the installation of VMware ESXi 5.1 and vCenter Server 5.1. You will learn to use Auto Deploy and Image Profiles to deploy stateless/stateful ESXi servers, configure failover protection for virtual machines using vSphere HA, configure automated load balancing using vSphere DRS and DPM. Finally, the book guides you through upgrading or patching ESXi servers using VMware Update Manager and also deploying and configuring vSphere Management Assistant (VMA) to be able to run scripts to manage the ESXi servers.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
VMware vSphere 5.1 Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


In this chapter we will learn how to enable and configure vSphere HA to react to host failures.

vSphere HA (High Availability) is a feature that can reduce unplanned virtual machine downtime. It does this at both the host and the virtual machine level. At the host level, it will monitor for host failures or network isolations and react accordingly. Depending on how it is configured to react, it can choose to restart or not restart the VMs that were running on a failed host. At the virtual machine level it can detect guest operating system and application failures and restart the virtual machines.

Starting with vSphere 5, HA has been completely recoded. It is also referred to as the Fault Domain Manager. It no longer uses Legato's AAM. The earlier concept of primary and secondary master has been relinquished as well.

With FDM, only one ESXi host among all the hosts in the cluster can become the master. The remaining hosts are slaves. During the master election process, a host with...