VMware vCenter Cookbook电子书

VMware vCenter Cookbook

Table of Contents

VMware vCenter Cookbook

Credits

Foreword

Overview and informational elements

The content

Chapter 1 – vCenter basis tasks and features

Chapter 2 – Increasing environment availability

Chapter 3 – Increasing environment scalability

Chapter 4 – Improving environment efficiency

Chapter 5 – Optimizing resource usage

Chapter 6 – Basic administrative tasks

Chapter 7 – Improving environment manageability

Wrapping up

About the Author

About the Reviewers

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Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Sections

Getting ready

How to do it…

How it works…

There's more…

See also

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Downloading the color images of this book

Errata

Piracy

Questions

1. vCenter Basic Tasks and Features

Introduction

Choosing the right vSphere and vCenter editions

How to do it...

vSphere editions

vCenter editions

There's more…

Booting a VM from a virtual CD-ROM

How to do it...

How it works...

Using hosts with different CPUs in one cluster

Getting ready

How to do it...

There's more…

Fixing VMware tools to autostart after Linux updates

How to do it...

There's more…

Running vCenter on a VM

How to do it...

There's more…

vCenter Server on a VM

Managing several vCenter Servers from one client

Getting ready

How to do it...

Joining vCenter to a group

Removing vCenter from a group

Accessing new vCenter features

How to do it...

There's more…

Accessing hosts via SSH

How to do it...

Opening the SSH port on the firewall

Starting an SSH service

There's more…

Securing host management access

How to do it...

Enable Lockdown mode from the ESXi console

Storing host logs on a shared datastore

How to do it...

There's more…

Configuring remote logging

How to do it...

2. Increasing Environment Availability

Introduction

Configuring the HA feature

How to do it...

Enabling host protection

Enabling VM monitoring

Prioritizing VMs for recovery

How to do it...

Tuning up vSphere HA

How to do it...

Ensuring 100 percent uptime for critical VMs

Getting ready

How to do it...

Verifying VM FT status

Disabling FT

There's more…

Protecting host redundancy for equally sized hosts

How to do it...

Protecting host redundancy for significantly different hosts

How to do it...

Protecting host redundancy with failover hosts

How to do it...

Backing up/restoring .vmdk files

Getting ready

How to do it...

VM backup

VM restore

There's more…

Restoring VM backup without vCenter

Getting ready

How to do it...

Configuring the backup retention policy

How to do it...

Protecting the vCenter VM

How to do it...

Virtualizing vCenter

Clustering the database

Third-party solutions

3. Increasing Environment Scalability

Introduction

Delivering new VMs faster with templates

How to do it...

There's more…

Delivering new VMs faster with customizations

How to do it...

Using customization

Troubleshooting customizations

How to do it...

There's more…

Keeping templates up to date

How to do it...

Utilizing host local storage

Getting ready

How to do it...

Create VMkernel NIC for vSAN

Enable vSAN on cluster level

Create vSAN disk groups

Creating a storage policy

How it works...

Automating VM deployments

Getting ready

How to do it...

Creating a deployment script

Running a deployment script

Deploying new hosts faster with scripted installation

How to do it...

Creating an installation script

Use the installation script to configure ESXi

Deploying new hosts faster with auto deploy

Getting ready

How to do it...

Configuring the TFTP server

Creating an image profile

Assigning an image profile to hosts

Assigning a host profile to hosts

Assigning a host to a folder or cluster in vCenter

How it works...

Keeping host configuration consistent

Getting ready

How to do it...

Creating a profile using a reference host

Add a host to a profile

Check a host's compliance

Applying a profile to a host

Increasing a VM's RAM and CPU online

Getting ready

How to do it...

There's more…

4. Improving Environment Efficiency

Introduction

Meeting higher I/O needs with the VMware Paravirtual controller

How to do it...

PVSCSI for a new VM

PVSCSI for new virtual drives

PVSCSI for existing OS virtual drives

Improving network performance with the VMXNET 3 network adapter

How to do it...

Using new virtual hardware

How to do it...

Choosing a virtual hardware version

Upgrading the virtual hardware

Controlling storage space used by virtual disks

How to do it...

Choosing disk provisioning for new VMs

Converting disk formats

Managing the space used by snapshots

How to do it...

Improving host productivity with Flash Read Cache

Getting ready

How to do it...

Speeding up VMs with Flash Read Cache

Getting ready

How to do it...

Optimizing host power consumption

Getting ready

How to do it...

Configuring DPM

Configuring HPM

How it works...

There's more…

Considering NUMA when configuring RAM

How to do it...

vCPU versus pCPU and time slots

How to do it...

5. Optimizing Resource Usage

Introduction

Prioritizing VMs with shares

How to do it...

Ensuring VMs have enough resources to run

How to do it...

Limiting resources used by VMs

How to do it...

Grouping VMs by resource usage

How to do it...

There's more…

Balancing loads between hosts

Getting ready

How to do it...

Creating a DRS cluster

Configuring VM options

Disabling DRS

Balancing loads between datastores

How to do it...

Creating a datastore cluster

Taking advantage of initial placement

Adding existing VMs to a datastore cluster

Reviewing and applying recommendations

Configuring storage load balancing thresholds

How to do it...

Changing the threshold for new clusters

Changing the threshold for existing clusters

How it works...

Limiting VM storage I/O consumption

How to do it...

Enabling SIOC on a datastore

Limiting I/Os per VM

Limiting VM network I/O consumption

How to do it...

Enabling NIOC

Creating network resource pool

Assigning port groups to network resource pools

Editing the network resource pool

Deleting a network resource pool

6. Basic Administrative Tasks

Introduction

Improving visibility with email alerts

How to do it...

Testing email alerts

Configuring email alerts for important events

There's more…

Controlling the space used by snapshots

How to do it...

Changing the VM snapshot file location

Controlling datastore space utilization

How to do it...

Disabling default alarm

Creating folders for datastores

Creating alarm definitions for each folder

Automating VM placement with storage profiles

Getting ready

How to do it...

Enable storage profiles and tag datastores

Creating storage policy

Assigning storage policy to a VM

Automating VM placement with VM affinity

How to do it...

Creating VM-to-Host rules

Creating VM-to-VM rules

Automating VM placement with storage affinity

Getting ready

How to do it...

Creating the Intra-VM rule

Creating a VM-to-VM rule

Changing default affinity rule

There's more…

Automating tasks with a scheduler

Getting ready

How to do it...

There's more…

Keeping hosts up to date

Getting ready

How to do it...

Installing the Update Manager server

Installing the Update Manager plugin

Creating baselines and groups

Attaching baselines or groups to hosts

Scanning and remediating objects

7. Improving Environment Manageability

Introduction

Categorizing objects in the environment

How to do it...

Scheduling the VM clone

Getting ready

How to do it...

Creating the script

Creating a scheduled task

Redirecting VMkernel dumps to another server

Getting ready

How to do it...

Configuring the Netdump collector service

Configuring the ESXi host for Netdump

Gathering network traffic

How to do it...

There's more…

VDS configuration backup and restore

How to do it...

Management network configuration recovery

How to do it...

Choosing a MAC address prefix

How to do it...

Getting familiar with new CLI

How to do it...

Formatter options

Management operations

Power operations

Networking operations

Configuring the firewall from CLI

How to do it...

Working with rules

Bypassing "hostd" when it's unresponsive with CLI

How to do it...

Index