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Implementing VMware vCenter Server
Implementing VMware vCenter Server

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.

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Implementing VMware vCenter Server

Chapter 2. Managing ESXi Hosts

This chapter focuses on different tasks related to host management in vCenter. We will discuss options available for storage, support, and redundancy.

Networking concepts incorporated in vSphere will be a large part of the discussion.

We will also talk about options available for the support of hosts with different processors.

The last part of this chapter is devoted to host profiles; a feature that can greatly simplify host management.

In this chapter, we will cover:

  • Adding and removing existing hosts

  • Host storage adapters and storage configuration—Fibre Channel, Internet SCSI, network-attached storage (NAS)

  • Storage logical unit number (LUNs) and datastores

  • Storage multipathing and failover

  • Storage Thin Provisioning

  • Network adapters and network configuration

  • Virtual switch concept—vSphere Standard and Distributed Switch

  • Setting up networking with redundancy

  • Managing hosts with different CPUs

  • Host profiles—profile workflow, managing profiles, and checking compliance

Adding and removing existing hosts


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:

  • Make sure you have the permission to create a host object

  • Make sure that datacenter, folder, or cluster object exist in the inventory

  • Make sure you have a username and password with administrative privileges on this host

  • Make sure the host is able to communicate with vCenter Server

  • Make sure the NFS mounts on the host are active, if applicable

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...

Storage


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:

  • Storage vMotion: This allows migrating virtual machines between available storages without any downtime

  • Storage Thin Provisioning: This improves space utilization by allocating available storage capacity between VMs dynamically

  • Storage DRS: This provides load balancing between available storages based on I/O latency and storage capacity

  • VMFS5: This is a high-performance filesystem optimized for VMs, and many more

Host storage adapters and storage configuration

The same way physical servers use disk controllers to access attached physical disks, VMs need virtual disc controllers to be able to use virtual disks. The following virtual SCSI controllers...

Networking


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

  • Virtual machine communication to a physical network and between each other

  • VMkernel services, such as NFS, iSCSI, and vMotion, and their connection to a physical network

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...

EVC mode


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:

  • Host CPU family and model

  • CPU features that are available based on the settings in BIOS

  • The ESX/ESXi version running on the host

  • The virtual machine's virtual hardware version

  • The virtual machine's guest operating system

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...

Host Profiles


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.

Profile workflow

Tasks related to host profiles are usually performed in a certain workflow order.

  • At least...

Summary


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...

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What you will learn

  • Deploy VMware vCenter Server and ESXi hosts
  • Create and clone virtual machines and work with templates
  • Reduce downtime, and configure and manage availability features
  • Allocate resources, and configure resource pools and DRS
  • Manage users
  • Secure ESXi hosts
  • Learn to use alerts
  • Work with VMware vCenter Operations Manager
  • Get to grips with VMware vCenter Orchestrator

Product Details

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Publication date, Length, Edition, Language, ISBN-13
Publication date : Oct 26, 2013
Length: 324 pages
Edition :
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781849689984
Vendor :
VMware

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Product Details

Publication date : Oct 26, 2013
Length: 324 pages
Edition :
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781849689984
Vendor :
VMware

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Table of Contents

9 Chapters
vCenter Deployment Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Managing ESXi Hosts Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Virtual Machine Management Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Availability Management Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Security Management Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Resource Management Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Events, Alarms, and Automated Actions Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
VMware vCenter Operations Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
VMware vCenter Orchestrator Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

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Alister Lewis-Bowen Apr 04, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
Pact Publishing very kindly provided me with the opportunity to read and review an electronic copy of Implementing VMware vCenter Server by Konstantin Kuminsky.The first chapter covers some useful primer information about architecture and terminology before taking you through prerequisites and installation. The next two chapters detail Host and VM deployment which forms the foundation for your vCenter implementation.The book then moves to the management of your virtual infrastructure and talks about HA, Fault tolerance, understanding how to share resources between your VMs and the powerful DRS feature. Chapter 7 takes you though how to monitor your system through alerts and performance metrics and ends on how you might use update manager to patch and upgrade your Hosts and VMs. The last two chapters of this book talk about VMware vCenter Operations and VMware vCenter Orchestrator which, when combined with VMware vCenter Server, provide a great virtual infrastructure suite for larger organizations.This book provides good practical information and a useful overview of deploying, managing and monitoring a VMware-based virtual infrastructure.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
W Boudville Jan 27, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
The promise of this book is to explain how your job as a vmWare administrator can be eased when using vCenter. The chapters have considerable details about many useful tasks you are likely to encounter. Like extending a logical volume in a linux operating system. The OS choices are Red Hat and CentOS; both very common. Unfortunately, ubuntu is not currently supported. Though who knows? By the time you read this, that may be true.Anyhow, this particular example demonstrates how easy it is to reboot the virtual machine and thence reconfigure to expand the volume. The steps given are quite explicitly detailed.Another tip is to install VMware Tools. Not strictly required, as the text admits. But it explicitly recommends that you can save yourself some time later by doing so. It delineates the main functions of the Tools. Like improving the graphics performance and that too of the mouse. Or for Microsoft Windows VMs, to improve the audio drivers.A later chapter talks about improving the uptime, or High Availability. It gives a quick run through of vCenter's ways to reduce both planned and unplanned downtime. This acknowledges that in reality both types of downtime can occur. So how to minimise each and thus curtail the impact on users [like your boss?] is vital. The basic solution is to make a vSphere HA cluster, to create redundancy. Yes, this looks straightforward. The cost of course is that you need the raw hardware slack to make that cluster.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
VirtuallyMikeB Mar 24, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon 4
I was recently given the opportunity to review Packt Publishing’s recent release of Implementing VMware vCenter Server: A practical guide for deploying and using VMware vCenter, suitable for IT professionals. At first glance, I wondered how an entire book could be written about vCenter alone. While reading it, though, I was pleasantly surprised time and again when I saw how much good information was shared. This book is an excellent primer for those new to vCenter and really, VMware in general.You can read the rest of my review on my blog: [...]Mike Brown--Mike BrownVMware, Cisco Data Center, and NetApp dudeConsulting [email protected]: @VirtuallyMikeBBlog:[...]LinkedIn: [...]
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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