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

Enabling vSphere DRS on a cluster


You can enable the vCenter Server to distribute the virtual machines across multiple ESXi hosts based on their resource requirements. To achieve this you need to enable vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) on the cluster.

How to do it…

The following procedure explains how to enable DRS on a cluster:

  1. From the vCenter's inventory home navigate to the Hosts and Clusters view.

  2. Select the cluster and navigate to Manage | Settings | vSphere DRS and then click on Edit….

  3. On the Edit Cluster Settings window, select the Turn ON vSphere DRS checkbox. Leave DRS Automation, Power Management, and Advanced Options at their defaults for now.

  4. Click on OK to enable DRS.

  5. The cluster's settings page should now show DRS enabled. It should read vSphere DRS is Turned ON.

How it works…

So how does DRS really work? DRS, once enabled, will aggregate the resources from the participating ESXi hosts as cluster resources.

Its job is to load-balance the DRS cluster for better utilization...