Mastering VMware vSphere 6.7

Effectively deploy, manage, and monitor your virtual datacenter with VMware vSphere 6.7, 2nd Edition

Martin Gavanda, Andrea Mauro, Paolo Valsecchi, Karel Novak

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781789612660
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Ciencia de la computación
• Subtopic: Virtualización

Unleash the benefits of VMware vSphere 6.7 to provide a powerful, flexible and secure digital infrastructure

Key Features

• Deep dive into areas like management, security, scalability, availability and more with vSphere 6.7
• Design, deploy and manage VMware vSphere virtual datacenters
• Implement monitoring and security of VMware workloads with ease

Book Description

vSphere 6.7 is the latest release of VMware's industry-leading, virtual cloud platform. It allows organisations to move to hybrid cloud computing by enabling them to run, manage, connect and secure applications in a common operating environment.

This up-to-date, 2nd edition provides complete coverage of vSphere 6.7. Complete with step-by-step explanations of essential concepts, practical examples and self-assessment questions, you will begin with an overview of the products, solutions and features of the vSphere 6.7 suite.

You'll learn how to design and plan a virtual infrastructure and look at the workflow and installation of components. You'll gain insight into best practice configuration, management and security.

By the end the book you'll be able to build your own VMware vSphere lab that can run even the most demanding of workloads.

What you will learn

• Explore the immense functionality of vSphere 6.7
• Design, manage and administer a virtualization environment
• Get tips for the VCP6-DCV and VCIX6-DCV exams
• Understand how to implement different migration techniques across different environments
• Explore vSphere 6.7s powerful capabilities for patching, upgrading and managing the configuration of virtual environments.
• Understand core vSphere components
• Master resource management, disaster recovery, troubleshooting, monitoring and security

Who this book is for

This book is for Administrators, Infrastructure Engineers, Architects, and Consultants with basic knowledge of VMware vSphere.

Section 1: Getting Started

This part introduces the new features of vSphere 6.7 and the vSphere ecosystem. We will cover the different logical and physical considerations of your vSphere projects, and we will show you how to assess your existing environment. Different types of project management techniques for IT-related projects will be described as well. At the end of this section you will see how to deploy your first vSphere infrastructure, and we will cover essential management skills. We will also cover different update approaches so your infrastructure is always up to date.

This section includes the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, Evolution to vSphere 6.7
• Chapter 2, Designing and Planning a Virtualization Infrastructure
• Chapter 3, Analysis and Assessment of Existing Environments
• Chapter 4, Deployment Workflow and Component Installation
• Chapter 5, Configuring and Managing vSphere 6.7
• Chapter 6, Life Cycle Management, Patching, and Upgrading

Evolution to vSphere 6.7

VMware vSphere 6.7 is the latest version of the most used enterprise virtualization platform. A good understanding of this product and its features is crucial for a successful implementation of the vSphere infrastructure.

In this chapter, we will provide you with a better understanding of the VMware product portfolio, the VMware vision, and the evolution of the product. We will also learn what is new in vSphere 6.7 and introduce the different solutions, features, and editions of vSphere. Furthermore, we will provide tips for choosing the right editions and version of vSphere and choosing when (and when not) to upgrade to vSphere 6.7.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

• Introduction to VMware vSphere
• VMware vSphere ecosystem
• Introduction to VMware Cloud on AWS
• What's new in VMware vSphere 6.7
• Reasons for and against upgrading

Introduction to VMware vSphere

With more than 500,000 customers globally, VMware remains a proven leader not only in virtualization but also in all technologies related to digital transformation. This year marks 20 years since the creation of VMware by Diane Greene, Mendel Rosenblum, Scott Devine, Ellen Wang, and Edouard Bugnion in 1998.

VMware has always focused on virtualization and its flagship product—VMware vSphere—proves that this was the right choice. The first version of ESXi hypervisor was released in 2001 and the first version of vCenter was then released two years later in 2003.

The VMware vSphere suite includes ESXi (the evolution of ESX Server) for the virtualization layer and the vCenter Server for the management layer.

Compute virtualization is only the first step here; to move to a real cloud computing infrastructure, you will not only need to compute resource abstraction (provided by virtualization) but also operation automation and agility (both of these are only partially obtainable through virtualization). Finally, this approach should not only be applied to the compute virtualization but also to the other resources, such as storage, networking, and security.

Today, VMware products can be used to fulfill this vision. There are three infrastructure pillars that VMware virtualizes:

• Compute resources—VMware vSphere
• Storage resources—VMware vSAN
• Network resources—VMware NSX

Together, these products build a unified platform for delivering any service with unmatched performance.

In this book, we are focusing primarily on VMware vSphere, but we will also touch on vSAN and NSX. However, this won't be covered in too much detail, as we will mainly look at compute virtualization using VMware vSphere.

"VMware is helping our customers and partners to achieve unlimited possibilities, while a shift to the digital is accelerating a technology supply to invent new products, deliver new services and find new ways to work and grow a business. Our solutions enable a business to build precisely what is needed in the way it is needed for today and tomorrow."

– Pat Gelsinger, VMware CEO

The digital transformation journey has four IT priorities that VMware focuses on:

• Modernizing data centers: Software-defined data center architecture to modernize existing data centers painlessly and automation to run enterprise and cloud-native workloads.
• Integrating public clouds: Provides extra agility and cross-cloud architecture. Cloud freedom brings a choice, and you can easily extend your on-premises infrastructure to include any vSphere-based-public cloud.

• Empowering the digital workspace: Introduces an exceptional mobile experience by providing users with a secure and digital workspace. VMware delivers virtualized applications and offers the ability to manage apps, access, and e...