VMware vSphere 5.1 Cookbook

VMware vSphere 5.1 Cookbook

By : Abhilash G B

Buy this Book

VMware vSphere 5.1 Cookbook

By: Abhilash G B

Buy this Book

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.

VMware vSphere 5.1 Cookbook

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

Upgrading to vSphere 5.1

Introduction

Carrying out pre-upgrade checks before performing a vCenter upgrade

Performing an in-place upgrade of vCenter Server

Creating a table space for SSO on a SQL instance

Creating DB users for the SSO database

Upgrading a 32-bit vCenter Server to vCenter 5.1

Upgrading to ESXi 5.1

Installing vSphere Web Client

Upgrading VMware Tools

Upgrading the virtual machine hardware

Performing a Fresh Installation of vSphere 5.1

Introduction

Installing vCenter 5.1

Deploying a VMware vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA)

Preparing vCenter Server Appliance for first use

Installing the vCenter Server Appliance update

Upgrading a vCenter Server Appliance

Installing ESXi 5.1

Performing a scripted install of the ESXi server

vSphere Auto Deploy

Introduction

Installing the Auto Deploy server

Configuring a TFTP server with Auto Deploy files

Configuring the DHCP server for PXE boot

Testing the PXE boot configuration

Preparing VMware PowerCLI for first use

Downloading an ESXi Offline Bundle

Adding the Offline Bundle to the Auto Deploy server

Choosing an ESXi Image to deploy

Creating a Host Profile

Creating a deploy rule

Activating a deploy rule

Testing Auto Deploy

Enabling Stateless Caching

Performing an Auto Deploy stateful install

ESXi Image Builder

Introduction

Creating an Image Profile by cloning an existing one

Removing an Image Profile

Adding a VIB (software package) to an Image Profile

Exporting an Image Profile as an ISO or Offline Bundle

Creating an Image Profile from scratch

Applying an Image Profile to the host

Creating and Managing VMFS Datastores

Introduction

Viewing the LUNs presented to an ESXi host

Viewing the datastores seen by the ESXi host

Viewing the multipathing information of a LUN

Creating a VMFS datastore

Expanding/growing a VMFS datastore

Extending a VMFS datastore

Unmounting a VMFS datastore

Mounting a VMFS datastore

Deleting a VMFS datastore

Upgrading VMFS-3 to VMFS-5

Mounting VMFS on a snapshot LUN

Resignaturing VMFS on a snapshot LUN

Masking paths to a LUN

Unmasking paths to a LUN

Creating a datastore cluster

Enabling Storage DRS

Managing iSCSI and NFS Storage

Introduction

Adding the software iSCSI adapter

Creating a new VMkernel interface for iSCSI or NFS

Preparing the vSphere network for iSCSI multipathing

Binding VMkernel interfaces to the software iSCSI adapter

Adding an iSCSI target server to the software iSCSI adapter

Creating an NFS datastore

Profile-driven Storage and Storage I/O Control

Introduction

Adding a storage provider

Creating user-defined storage capabilities

Mapping user-defined storage capabilities to datastores

Creating a VM storage profile and enabling it

Assigning storage profiles to virtual machine disks and checking compliance

Enabling Storage I/O Control (SIOC)

Modifying disk shares on a VM

Configuring the vSphere Network

Introduction

Creating a vSphere Standard Switch

Deleting a vSphere Standard Switch

Creating a VMkernel interface on a vSphere Standard Switch

Deleting a port group

Adding an uplink to a vSphere Standard Switch

Creating a vSphere Distributed Switch

Creating a distributed port group

Adding hosts to a vSphere Distributed Switch

Mapping a physical adapter (vmnic) to a dvUplink

Migrating virtual machine network from vSphere Standard Switch to vSphere Distributed Switch

Migrating management and VMkernel interfaces between vSphere Standard and Distributed Switches

Creating a VMkernel interface on a vSphere Distributed Switch

Exporting the vSphere Distributed Switch configuration

Restoring the vSphere Distributed Switch configuration

Importing a vSphere Distributed Switch into the datacenter from a backup

Enabling port mirroring on a DSwitch

Enabling NetFlow on a DSwitch

Configuring private VLANs (PVLANs) on a DSwitch

Creating and Managing Virtual Machines

Introduction

Creating a virtual machine

Creating a new hard disk for a virtual machine

Adding an existing hard disk to a virtual machine

Attaching RDM to a virtual machine

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

Adding a new virtual network adapter to a virtual machine

Creating a virtual machine snapshot

Deleting a virtual machine snapshot

Reverting to a current virtual machine snapshot

Going to a virtual machine snapshot

Consolidating snapshots

Exporting a virtual machine

Configuring vSphere HA

Introduction

Enabling vSphere HA on a cluster

Setting host isolation response for an HA cluster

Setting VM restart priority for an HA cluster

Configuring VM monitoring

Configuring datastore heartbeating

Disabling host monitoring

Configuring vSphere HA admission control

Configuring a VM to override host monitoring and VM monitoring settings

Configuring vSphere DRS, DPM, and VMware EVC

Introduction

Enabling vSphere DRS on a cluster

Choosing a DRS automation level

Overriding the cluster automation level for a VM

Setting a migration threshold

Creating host and VM DRS groups

Creating virtual machines to host affinity rules

Creating "Inter-VM" affinity/anti-affinity rules

Configuring vSphere Distributed Power Management (DPM)

Enabling power management on a per-host level

Configuring VMware EVC (Enhanced vMotion Compatibility)

Upgrading and Patching using vSphere Update Manager

Introduction

Preparing a database for vSphere Update Manager

Installing vSphere Update Manager

Installing the vSphere Update Manager plugin

Adding a download source

Creating a baseline

Importing ESXi Images

Creating a host baseline group

Creating a VM and VA baseline group

Remediating a host or a cluster

Remediating a VM or a VA

Staging patches

Installing the Update Manager Download Service (UMDS)

Configuring UMDS and downloading data

Creating a shared repository

Using a shared repository

Using vSphere Management Assistant (vMA 5.1)

Introduction

Deploying the vMA appliance

Preparing vMA for first use

Configuring 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

Reconfiguring an added target server

Running CLI command on target servers

Index

Customer Reviews

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Setting VM restart priority for an HA cluster

Setting restart priorities for individual VMs will help VMware HA to determine which VM should be restarted when an ESXi host fails.

The priorities set are relative. HA will restart VMs with the highest priority first. If the priority is set to Disabled for a VM, then in the event of a host failure, that particular VM will not be restarted. The priorities set are to only for HA to determine the restart order; they don't affect the VM monitoring.

In this recipe we learn how to configure the VM restart priority for an HA cluster.

How to do it...

The following procedure explains how to set/modify VM restart priority settings for an HA cluster:

From the vCenter's Home inventory, navigate to the Hosts and Clusters view.
Select the cluster and navigate to Manage | Settings | vSphere HA, and click on Edit.
In the Edit Cluster Settings window, click on Host Monitoring to expand and view its additional settings.
Use the VM restart priority drop-down menu to choose...

VMware vSphere 5.1 Cookbook

By : Abhilash G B

VMware vSphere 5.1 Cookbook

By: Abhilash G B

Overview of this book

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VMware vSphere 5.1 Cookbook

Setting VM restart priority for an HA cluster

How to do it...