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

Upgrading VMFS-3 to VMFS-5


There are several enhancements added to VMFS Version 5. Knowing these enhancements will definitely motivate you to upgrade to this version. Nevertheless, the upgrade process is non-disruptive.

Although this is an in-place upgrade, you should take the following precautions before you do the upgrade:

  • Backup the virtual machines on the volume or migrate them off to a different datastore

  • Make sure that there are no ESX 3.x or ESX 4.x servers in the environment accessing the same datastore.

The VMware® vSphere® VMFS-5 Upgrade Considerations whitepaper explains more about VMFS-5 enhancement and the upgrade considerations, available at http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMFS-5_Upgrade_Considerations.pdf.

How to do it...

VMFS upgrade can be done in the following two ways:

  • By using the vSphere Web Client GUI

  • By using vmkfstools

Upgrading the VMFS using vSphere Web Client GUI

The following procedure will guide you through the steps required to upgrade a VMFS datastore:

  1. Use the...