VMware vCenter Cookbook

Book Image

VMware vCenter Cookbook

By : Kostantin Kuminsky

Book Image

VMware vCenter Cookbook

By: Kostantin Kuminsky

Overview of this book

VMware vCenter Cookbook

VMware vCenter Cookbook

Credits

Foreword

About the Author

About the Author

About the Reviewers

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

vCenter Basic Tasks and Features

vCenter Basic Tasks and Features

Choosing the right vSphere and vCenter editions

Booting a VM from a virtual CD-ROM

Using hosts with different CPUs in one cluster

Fixing VMware tools to autostart after Linux updates

Running vCenter on a VM

Managing several vCenter Servers from one client

Accessing new vCenter features

Accessing hosts via SSH

Securing host management access

Storing host logs on a shared datastore

Configuring remote logging

Increasing Environment Availability

Increasing Environment Availability

Configuring the HA feature

Prioritizing VMs for recovery

Tuning up vSphere HA

Ensuring 100 percent uptime for critical VMs

Protecting host redundancy for equally sized hosts

Protecting host redundancy for significantly different hosts

Protecting host redundancy with failover hosts

Backing up/restoring .vmdk files

Restoring VM backup without vCenter

Configuring the backup retention policy

Protecting the vCenter VM

Increasing Environment Scalability

Increasing Environment Scalability

Delivering new VMs faster with templates

Delivering new VMs faster with customizations

Troubleshooting customizations

Keeping templates up to date

Utilizing host local storage

Automating VM deployments

Deploying new hosts faster with scripted installation

Deploying new hosts faster with auto deploy

Keeping host configuration consistent

Increasing a VM's RAM and CPU online

Improving Environment Efficiency

Improving Environment Efficiency

Meeting higher I/O needs with the VMware Paravirtual controller

Improving network performance with the VMXNET 3 network adapter

Using new virtual hardware

Controlling storage space used by virtual disks

Managing the space used by snapshots

Improving host productivity with Flash Read Cache

Speeding up VMs with Flash Read Cache

Optimizing host power consumption

Considering NUMA when configuring RAM

vCPU versus pCPU and time slots

Optimizing Resource Usage

Optimizing Resource Usage

Prioritizing VMs with shares

Ensuring VMs have enough resources to run

Limiting resources used by VMs

Grouping VMs by resource usage

Balancing loads between hosts

Balancing loads between datastores

Configuring storage load balancing thresholds

Limiting VM storage I/O consumption

Limiting VM network I/O consumption

Basic Administrative Tasks

Basic Administrative Tasks

Improving visibility with email alerts

Controlling the space used by snapshots

Controlling datastore space utilization

Automating VM placement with storage profiles

Automating VM placement with VM affinity

Automating VM placement with storage affinity

Automating tasks with a scheduler

Keeping hosts up to date

Improving Environment Manageability

Improving Environment Manageability

Categorizing objects in the environment

Scheduling the VM clone

Redirecting VMkernel dumps to another server

Gathering network traffic

VDS configuration backup and restore

Management network configuration recovery

Choosing a MAC address prefix

Getting familiar with new CLI

Configuring the firewall from CLI

Bypassing "hostd" when it's unresponsive with CLI

Index

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Introduction

In this chapter, we will review some options and features available in vCenter to improve an administrator's efficiency. Templates, customizations, host profiles and other solutions designed to automate and simplify VM, host deployment, and configuration at the end of the day allow faster time to market, which is expected by many businesses nowadays.