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

Adding an ESXi host to vMA


Instead of adding a vCenter Server to vMA, it is possible to add just the individual ESXi hosts. This is particularly useful if a single vCenter is used to manage multiple Data Centers and you don't want to expose all of the ESXi hosts managed by the vCenter to the vMA appliance.

How to do it…

The following procedure explains how to add an ESXi server to the vMA appliance.

  1. Log in to the vMA console or SSH to it as the vi-admin user.

  2. Issue the following command:

    vifp addserver <ESXi_server_name>
    

    Example:

    vifp addserver esx51-01.vdescribed.com
    
  3. When prompted, specify the root password for the ESXi host.

  4. Issue the vifp listservers command to verify that the ESXi host was added.

How it works…

When you add an ESXi server to vMA, unlike adding a vCenter Server, vMA doesn't store the root password in its credstore.

Instead, it will create two users on the target ESXi server:

  • vi-admin with administrator privileges

  • vi-user with read-only privilege

On the ESXi server, the /etc...