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


Networking is the backbone of any infrastructure, be it virtual or physical. In this chapter, we will learn how to create and configure the basic switching constructs of vSphere networking.

Before we start learning how to create these constructs, it is important to have a brief understanding of them.

  • vSphere Standard Switch (vSS): It is a software switching construct local to each ESXi server that provides a network infrastructure for the virtual machines running on that server. Unlike a physical switch, the vSphere Standard Switch is not a managed switch. It doesn't learn MAC addresses and build a CAM table like a physical switch, but it does know the MAC addresses of the virtual machine vNICs connected to it.

    The vSwitch has logical ports to which a virtual machine's virtual NIC connects.

    Note

    The logical ports themselves cannot be chosen during the configuration; it is always a port group "label" that a virtual machine's vNIC would be configured to use.

  • vSphere Distributed Switch...