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

Introduction


Starting with vSphere 5.0, VMware doesn't offer the ESX classic version, but the ESXi hypervisor version. The classic version of the ESX server had a Linux-based Service Console. One of the most evident benefits of removing the Service Console is that ESX hypervisor version (ESXi) will have a smaller installation footprint. It can even be embedded on the server boards or USB drives. Because of the smaller footprint, the installation is faster. Historically, most of the security updates that VMware released were for the Service Console and not for the hypervisor component. Meaning, as we move ahead we will require less frequent patching to be done on the ESXi servers.

The vCenter Server is the component that provides centralized management of your vSphere environment. Most of the administrative tasks on a single ESXi server can be done by using the vSphere Windows Client software. As in most cases, however, when you have an environment that has multiple ESXi servers, managing...