VMware vSphere Essentials

Kunal Kumar, Christian Stankowic

• Verlag: Packt Publishing
• Jahr: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781784395926
• Thema: Informatique
• Thema: Cybersécurité

About This Book

• Plan, deploy, and manage your vSphere environment for even the most complex IT infrastructures
• Familiarize yourself with vSphere infrastructure to become a skilled vSphere administrator
• Seamlessly configure and deploy vSphere with simple examples in this fast-paced guide

Who This Book Is For

This book is intended for virtualization administrators who want to learn VMware vSphere quickly. It is assumed that you have some basic knowledge of virtualization and the vSphere environment.

VMware vSphere Essentials

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Table of Contents

VMware vSphere Essentials

Credits

Foreword

About the Authors

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Support files, eBooks, discount offers, and more

Why subscribe?

Free access for Packt account holders

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the color images of this book

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. Introduction to VMware vSphere

Need and use of VMware vSphere

Differences between VMware vSphere and other hypervisors

Understanding ESXi and modes of management

History of ESXi

Understanding ESXi

Managing ESXi

vSphere Client

vSphere Web Client

Virtual hardware versions

vSphere editions and kits

Different types of vSphere installations

Fresh installation

Auto Deploy

Upgrading an ESXi host

Introduction to virtual infrastructure – virtual machines, disks, CPUs, memory, switches, network, and storage

Virtual machines

CPU virtualization

Memory virtualization

Physical and virtual networking

Physical and virtual storage

Summary

2. VMware vCenter Server

Introduction to vCenter Server

vCenter Server architecture

Communication between vCenter Server and ESXi hosts

Additional vCenter Server components

Comparison of vCenter Server and vCenter Server Appliance

Preparing and installing vCenter Server on Microsoft Windows

Hardware, software, and network requirements

Database preparation

vCenter Server installation

Importing, starting, and configuring the vCenter Server Appliance

vCenter Server Appliance features

vCenter Server Appliance benefits

vCenter Server Appliance requirements

Importing the vCenter Server Appliance

Deploying vCSA 6.0

Starting the vCenter Server Appliance 5.5

Configuring the vCenter Server Appliance time zone

Connecting to the web interface on vSphere 5.x

Configuring and managing vCenter Server

Managing vCenter Server Appliance services

Single Sign-On

Advantages of vCenter Single Sign-On

Characteristics of vCenter Single Sign-On

Managing inventory, hosts, VMs, and templates via vCenter

Data center objects

Organizing the inventory objects

Navigating the vSphere Web Client

Adding the host to vCenter Server

vCenter Server licensing

Backing up vCenter Server

Summary

3. Creating Virtual Machines

Overview of virtual machines

Virtual machine files

Virtual hardware versions

Creating a virtual machine

Creating a new virtual machine using the wizard

Importing an OVF file

Thick and thin provisioning of virtual disks

Installing a guest operating system

Customizing the guest operating system

VMware Tools

Creating templates and clones

Deploying a virtual machine from a template

Cloning a virtual machine

Summary

4. Managing Virtual Network

Virtual network

An overview of virtual switches

Basic network operations using vSphere

Assigning an IP address to an ESXi host

Creating vSwitches and virtual ports

Understanding virtual switch and port types

vNetwork Standard Switch

vNetwork Distributed Virtual Switch

Benefits of distributed over standard

Virtual switch ports

Design ideas

Blade server-based approach

Rack server-based approach

Additional ideas for optimizing fault tolerance network designs

Connecting a virtual machine to a port group

An overview of VLANs

Creating VLANs

Network security policies

Security policy

Traffic shaping

NIC teaming

Load Balancing with vSphere

Summary

5. Network Virtualization with VMware NSX

NSX components

Deploying NSX Manager

Steps for installing NSX Manager

Data center access layer deployment

Logical routing

Distributed routing

Centralized routing

Logical switching

Logical firewalls

Network isolation

Network segmentation

Logical load balancing

Summary

6. Managing Virtual Storage

Understanding virtual storage, datastores, and file systems

Datastores

VMFS datastores

NFS datastores

Managing and configuring datastores

Creating a VMFS datastore using vSphere Web Client

Creating an NFS datastore in vSphere Web Client

Upgrading a VMFS datastore

Increasing the VMFS datastore's capacity

Increasing the VMFS datastore's size using vSphere Web Client

Unmounting and mounting a VMFS datastore

Removing a VMFS datastore

vSphere Storage APIs for Data Protection (VADP)

Data deduplication

vSphere Data Protection Appliance

Available editions

Deploying and configuring VDP

Data backup

Data recovery

Summary

7. Working with VSAN

An overview of Virtual SAN

Requirements of VSAN

Benefits of using VSAN

VSAN sizing tool

Installing and configuring VSAN

Virtual SAN datastore properties

Virtual machine requirements

Virtual machine storage policies

Enabling and creating virtual machine storage policies

Assigning a virtual machine storage policy during provisioning

Virtual machine compliance

Failure resilience with VSAN

Summary

8. Managing Virtual Machines

Deploying virtual machines across data centers

Modifying the virtual machine settings

Adding devices to a virtual machine

Increasing the size of a virtual disk

Inflating a thin provisioned disk

Migrating virtual machines

Using VMware vMotion

Virtual machine requirements for vMotion

Host requirements for vMotion

VMware Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC)

EVC requirements

Configuring EVC

Migrating a virtual machine

Using Storage vMotion

Migrating a virtual machine using Storage vMotion

Guidelines to use Storage vMotion

Using Enhanced vMotion

Host requirements for Enhanced vMotion

Migrating a virtual machine using Enhanced vMotion

Virtual machine snapshots

The process of taking snapshots

Managing snapshots

Summary

9. Resource Management and Performance Monitoring

Virtual memory management

Virtual machine memory over-commitment

Virtual machine swap files

Memory reclamation techniques

Virtual CPU

CPU load balancing

Hyper-threading

Understanding resource controls and resource...