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.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)

Upgrading from VMFS 5 to VMFS 6

Unlike the previous VMFS upgrade, there is no method to perform an in-place upgrade of a VMFS 5 volume to VMFS 6. As per VMware, this is due to the changes done to the structure of VMFS metadata to make compatible with 4K alignment. In this recipe, we will provide you with a high-level overview to migrate your workload to VMFS 6.

How to do it...

The following high-level procedure will help you host all your VM workload on VMFS 6 volumes:

  1. Make an inventory of all your datastores and their current utilization.
  2. Now, depending on the amount of free space available in the storage array, you can choose to create LUNs of the same size as the existing datastores or create a set of larger LUNs to temporarily...