Preface

Virtualization is a hot topic today. It saves the time and effort of IT professionals, helps to keep the infrastructure costs down, and helps to make the IT industry greener. VMware, one of the major players in the virtualization market, offer great scalability and reliability features, professional support, and constantly work for improvements in their products. VMware vCenter Server is a necessary component for any professional vSphere implementation. It offers a great variety of features and capabilities that simplify an administrator's day-to-day work.

This book is a practical and hands-on guide to VMware vCenter Server that provides descriptions of its features and capabilities as well as useful tips for performingday-to-day administrative tasks.

This book starts with an introduction to VMware vCenter Server, describing the requirements and deployment steps along the way. It then takes you through a description of product features and different aspects of administration, giving useful tips on day-to-day tasks. You will also learn how to deploy VMware vCenter Server and manage hosts and virtual machines. We will take a look at security features, availability, and resource management, and also discuss monitoring and automation topics.

The last two chapters describe additional products that can be used with VMware vCenter Server: VMware vCenter Operations and VMware vCenter Orchestrator. If you want to learn how VMware vCenter Server can help in managing your environment, then this is the book for you.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, vCenter Deployment, gives a brief overview of the features available in vCenter, the terminology used in VMware, vSphere architecture, and the licensing options available for vCenter. The second half of the chapter focuses on the vCenter installation process, including prerequisites and follow-up tasks.

Chapter 2, Managing ESXi Hosts, is devoted to different aspects of host management in vCenter, such as storage support and redundancy, networking concepts incorporated in vSphere, the options available for supporting hosts with different processors, and host profiles.

Chapter 3, Virtual Machine Management, focuses on managing virtual machines in vCenter, time synchronization challenges for a VM's operating system, and VM snapshots.

Chapter 4, Availability Management, describes the features in vCenter that allow you to reduce downtime and make sure your services are available for end users most of the time. The features are vSphere High Availability, Fault Tolerance including host and VM monitoring, datastore heartbeating, and Dynamic Resource Scheduler (DRS).

Chapter 5, Security Management, focuses on users and groups and the logic behind them, user authentication, and roles and permissions. The second part of this chapter is devoted to ESXi firewall, security certificates, and ESXi lockdown mode.

Chapter 6, Resource Management, discusses the different aspects of resource allocation such as shares, reservations, limits, and resource pools. This chapter also covers DRS and power management.

Chapter 7, Events, Alarms, and Automated Actions, focuses on the availability of automation and the monitoring options in vCenter, which includes performance and storage monitoring, possible response actions, scheduled tasks, and the Update Manager plugin.

Chapter 8, VMware vCenter Operations, describes the requirements, installation, and configuration of real-time performance monitoring and management offered by VMware. It also focuses on the way this software is organized and the logic behind it.

Chapter 9, VMware vCenter Orchestrator, gives a brief overview of VMware vCenter Orchestrator, its requirements, and the installation process—initial configurations, networking, LDAP, database connectivity, and SSL security. It also describes several administration aspects of vCenter Orchestrator, such as workflows, elements, and actions.

What you need for this book

You do not need to have prior experience with any software in order to read this book, but a working knowledge of the following would be good to have:

• ESXi 4.1 or later

• vCenter Server 4.1 or later

• VMware vCenter Orchestrator 4.2 or later

• VMware Operations 5 or later

Who this book is for

This book is useful for administrators and technicians who are only starting just getting started with VMware or who already have some experience with other virtualization products. It is beneficial for IT professionals who are working on expanding their existing environment and are concerned about being able to manage it better. IT managers will also find it helpful in terms of improving cost efficiency, ensuring required levels of service, and its reporting abilities.

Conventions

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Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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