Implementing VMware vCenter Server: This book starts with the basics then leads you by the hand through a complete Vmware vCenter Server implementation course. Designed to help you administer and manage your environment on a day to day basis.

Once ESXi is installed on a server, connected to your network, and configured, it can be added to vCenter Server so that you can manage it. A host can be added under datacenter, folder, or cluster object. If a host already contains virtual machines, they will be added to the inventory together with the host.

Before adding a host:

To add a host, select the appropriate object (datacenter, cluster, or folder) in the inventory and navigate to File | New | Add host. You will be prompted to enter the host's IP address and administrative credentials. Optionally, you can choose to enable lockdown mode, which will disable remote...

ESXi abstracts physical storage from virtual machines by providing host-level storage virtualization. This additional virtualization level gives more flexibility and makes it possible to have storage-related features that are hard to implement with traditional physical servers.

For example, vSphere 5 introduced storage-related features such as:

A virtual network provides two types of services to hosts and virtual machines:

Network adapters and network configuration

To view or configure networking as well as network adapters, select a host from the inventory, and go to the Configuration tab. Select Networking from the left-hand side of the screen, and choose the type of networking to view: vSphere Standard Switch or vSphere Distributed Switch, as shown in the following screenshot:

Information about physical adapters available on a host can be accessed from the Network Adapters view under the Configuration tab. The following table shows the available adapter parameters:

Option	Description
Device	Name of the network adapter
Speed	Actual speed and duplex of the network adapter
Configured	Configured speed and duplex of the network adapter
Switch	vSphere...

Before vCenter Server allows migration of running or suspended VM from one host to another, it performs a number of compatibility checks to make sure that this virtual machine will be able to resume or keep running on the new host.

One of the requirements is CPU compatibility, that is, the processor on the target host should be able to provide the same set of features to the VM after migration. This CPU feature set is determined based on the following items:

The reason for the last requirement is that when a virtual machine is booting up, operating systems perform a check of the CPU type with the CPUID instruction. The response tells the OS which features and instructions are available with the current CPU. The OS in turn tells applications which functionality is available...

With Host Profiles, administrators can better manage host configurations especially for larger environments with many ESX or ESXi servers. Host profiles eliminate manual per-host configuration and help to maintain consistency across your environment.

Host Profiles are supported only in vSphere 4 or later.

Host Profiles is a feature that needs to be licensed. It comes with the Enterprise Plus license. Therefore, if there are any issues with it, checking if you are using the correct license is going to be the first troubleshooting step.

If a host has been deployed with vSphere Auto Deploy, its configuration is captured in Host Profile. The profile in most cases is sufficient to store the whole configuration. In certain cases however, when a host that was provisioned with Auto Deploy boots, the user will be prompted for input. In this case, administrators can use the answer file.

Once ESXi is installed on a server, connected to your network, and configured, it can be added to vCenter Server so that you can manage it.

ESXi abstracts physical storage from virtual machines by providing host-level storage virtualization. There are two types of physical storage: local and networked.

In VMware terminology, target means a single storage unit that can be accessed by a host. LUN or device is a logical volume that can be used by a host; in other words, it's a space on the target. Therefore, a target may contain one or more LUNs. Datastores are logical containers similar to filesystems that hide differences of each storage device from virtual machines.

With ESXi, it's possible to use more than one physical path for data transfer between a host and an external storage. This technique is called multipathing, and it allows administrators to maintain a constant connection between hosts and storage to ensure uptime in case of a failure.

Thin provisioning is a method of allocating...