VMware vSphere Configuration

and Management v6

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 Outline
• Course Introduction
– Introductions and course logistics
– Course objectives
– References and resources
• Installing vSphere Components
– Install ESXi
– Introduce vCenter Server deployment options
– Describe vCenter Server hardware, software, and database
requirements
– Discuss installation of vCenter Server
– Appliance and a vCenter Server instance
– Demonstrate vCenter Server installation

2
 Outline
• Creating Virtual Machines
– Introduce virtual machines, virtual machine hardware, and virtual
machine files
– Create and work with virtual machines and templates
• vCenter Server
– Introduce the vCenter Server architecture
– Deploy and configure vCenter Server Appliance
– Use vSphere Web Client
– Manage vCenter Server inventory objects and licenses
• Configuring and Managing Virtual Networks
– Describe, create, and manage standard switches
– Configure virtual switch security and load balancing policies
– Create, configure, and manage vSphere distributed switches, network
connections, and port groups

3
 Outline
• Configuring and Managing Virtual Storage
– Introduce storage protocols and storage device types
– Discuss ESXi hosts using iSCSI and NFS storage
– Create and manage VMFS and NFS datastores
– Introduce VMware Virtual SAN™
– Introduce Virtual Volumes
• Virtual Machine Management
– Use templates and cloning to deploy new virtual machines
– Modify and manage virtual machines
– Perform vSphere vMotion and vSphere
– Storage vMotion migrations
– Create and manage virtual machine snapshots
– Create vApps
– Introduce the types of content libraries and how to deploy and use them

4
 Outline
• Resource Management and Monitoring
– Introduce virtual CPU and memory concepts
– Configure and manage resource pools
– Describe methods for optimizing CPU and memory usage
– Use various tools to monitor resource usage
– Create and use alarms to report certain conditions or events
– Identify and troubleshoot virtual machine resource issues
– Introduce vRealize Operations Manager for data center monitoring and management
– vSphere HA and vSphere Fault Tolerance
– Explain the vSphere HA architecture
– Configure and manage a vSphere HA cluster
– Use vSphere HA advanced parameters
– Introduce vSphere Fault Tolerance
– Enable vSphere Fault Tolerance on virtual machines
– Introduce vSphere Replication
– Use vSphere Data Protection to back up and restore data

5
 Outline
• Host Scalability
– Describe the functions and benefits of a vSphere DRS cluster
– Configure and manage a vSphere DRS cluster
– Work with affinity and anti-affinity rules
– Use vSphere HA and vSphere DRS together for business
continuity
• vSphere Update Manager and Host Maintenance
– Use vSphere Update Manager to manage ESXi patching
– Install vSphere Update Manager and the vSphere Update
Manager plug-in
– Create patch baselines
– Use host profiles to manage host configuration compliance

6
VMware vSphere and Virtualizing the
IT Infrastructure
• VMware vSphere uses virtualization to transform
datacenters into scalable, aggregated computing
infrastructures.
• A virtual infrastructure presents IT organizations with
increased flexibility in how they deliver their services.
• A virtual infrastructure also serves as the foundation for
cloud computing.
• Cloud computing is an approach to computing that builds
on virtualization's efficient pooling of resources to create
an on-demand, elastic, self-managing virtual infrastructure
that can be allocated dynamically as a service.
• Virtualization uncouples applications and information from
the complexity of the underlying hardware infrastructure.

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 Aspects of Virtualization
• VMware vSphere virtualizes and aggregates the
underlying physical hardware resources across multiple
systems and provides pools of virtual resources to the
datacenter.
• Virtualization is a process that breaks the hard
connection between the physical hardware and the
operating system and applications running on it.
• After being virtualized in a vSphere virtual machine,
the operating system and applications are no longer
constrained by the limits imposed by residing on a
single physical machine.

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 Virtualizing the Computer
• The x86 computer hardware is designed to run a single
operating system and a single application, leaving most
machines underused.
• Even with many applications installed, most machines
are underused.
• At the most basic level, virtualizing lets you run
multiple virtual machines on a single physical machine,
with each virtual machine sharing the resources of that
one physical computer across multiple environments.
• Different virtual machines can run different operating
systems and multiple applications, in isolation, side-by-
side on the same physical machine.

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Virtualizing the Computer and Adding
Virtual Machines

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Virtualizing the Infrastructure

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 Virtualizing the Infrastructure
• A virtual infrastructure consists of the
following components:
– Bare-metal hypervisors to enable full virtualization
of each x86 computer.
– Virtual infrastructure services such as resource
management to optimize available resources
among virtual machines.
– Automation solutions that provide special
capabilities to optimize a particular IT process
such as provisioning or disaster recovery.

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Server Consolidation

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 VMware vSphere Components and
Features
• VMware ESXi : A virtualization layer run on physical servers
that abstracts processor, memory, storage, and resources
into multiple virtual machines.
• VMware vCenter Server : The central point for configuring,
provisioning, and managing virtualized IT environments. It
provides essential datacenter services such as access
control, performance monitoring, and alarm management.
• VMware vSphere Client : An interface that enables users to
connect remotely to vCenter Server or ESXi from any
Windows PC.
• VMware vSphere Web Client : A Web interface that
enables users to connect remotely to vCenter Server from a
variety of Web browsers and operating systems.

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 VMware vSphere Components and
Features
• VMware vSphere SDKs : Feature that provides
standard interfaces for VMware and third-party
solutions to access VMware vSphere.
• vSphere Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) : A high
performance cluster file system for ESXi virtual
machines.
• vSphere Virtual SMP : Enables a single virtual machine
to use multiple physical processors simultaneously.
• vSphere vMotion : Enables the migration of powered-
on virtual machines from one physical server to
another with zero down time, continuous service
availability, and complete transaction integrity.

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 VMware vSphere Components and
Features
• vSphere Storage vMotion : Enables the migration of
virtual machine files from one datastore to another
without service interruption. You can place the virtual
machine and all its disks in a single location, or select
separate locations for the virtual machine
configuration file and each virtual disk. The virtual
machine remains on the same host during Storage
vMotion.
• vSphere High Availability (HA) : A feature that provides
high availability for virtual machines. If a server fails,
affected virtual machines are restarted on other
available servers that have spare capacity.

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 VMware vSphere Components and
Features
• vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) :
Allocates and balances computing capacity dynamically
across collections of hardware resources for virtual
machines. This feature includes distributed power
management (DPM) capabilities that enable a
datacenter to significantly reduce its power
consumption.
• vSphere Storage DRS Allocates and balances storage
capacity and I/O dynamically across collections of
datastores. This feature includes management
capabilities that minimize the risk of running out of
space and the risk of I/O bottlenecks slowing the
performance of virtual machines.
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 VMware vSphere Components and
Features
• vSphere Fault Tolerance : Provides continuous availability
by protecting a virtual machine with a copy. When this
feature is enabled for a virtual machine, a secondary copy
of the original, or primary, virtual machine is created. All
actions completed on the primary virtual machine are also
applied to the secondary virtual machine. If the primary
virtual machine becomes unavailable, the secondary
machine becomes immediately active.
• vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS): A virtual switch that can
span multiple ESXi hosts, enabling significant reduction of
on-going network maintenance activities and increasing
network capacity. This increased efficiency enables virtual
machines to maintain consistent network configuration as
they migrate across multiple hosts.

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Virtual Datacenter Architecture

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 Virtual Datacenter Architecture
• A host is the virtual representation of the computing
and memory resources of a physical machine running
ESXi.
• When two or more physical machines are grouped to
work and be managed as a whole, the aggregate
computing and memory resources form a cluster.
• Machines can be dynamically added or removed from a
cluster.
• Computing and memory resources from hosts and
clusters can be finely partitioned into a hierarchy of
resource pools.

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 Virtual Datacenter Architecture
• Datastores are virtual representations of combinations
of underlying physical storage resources in the
datacenter.
• These physical storage resources can come from the
following sources:
– Local SCSI, SAS, or SATA disks of the server
– Fibre Channel SAN disk arrays
– iSCSI SAN disk arrays
– Network Attached Storage (NAS) arrays
• A datastore cluster is an aggregation of multiple
datastores into a single logical, load-balanced pool.
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vCenter Server Components

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