vSphere 5

VMware vCenter Server allows you to centrally manage hosts from either a physical or virtual Windows machine, and enables the use of advanced features such as vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), vSphere High Availability (HA), vSphere vMotion, vSphere Storage vMotion, and vSphere Auto Deploy. You can install vCenter Server in a Microsoft Windows virtual machine that runs on an ESXi host. Deploying the vCenter Server system in the virtual machine has the following advantages:

- You can provide high availability for the vCenter Server system by using vSphere HA.
- You can migrate the VM containing vCenter from one host to another.
- You can create snapshots of the vCenter Server virtual machine.
- Rather than dedicating a separate server to the vCenter Server system, you can place it in a virtual machine running on the same host where your other virtual machines run.

This video will show you how to install VMware vCenter Server 5.0 in a virtual machine 13 simple steps.

Step 1 > In the software installer directory, double-click the autorun.exe file to start the installer.

Step 2 > Select vCenter Server.

Step 3 > Follow the prompts in the installation wizard to choose the installer language, agree to the end user patent and license agreements, enter your user name, organization name, and license key.If you omit the license key, vCenter Server will be in evaluation mode, which allows you to use the full feature set for a 60-day evaluation period.

Step 4 > Choose the type of database that you want to use.

Step 5 > Set the login information for vCenter Server.

Step 6 > Either accept the default destination folders or click Change to select another location.

Step 7 > Select Create a standalone VMware vCenter Server instance or Join Group.Join a Linked Mode group to enable the vSphere Client to view, search, and manage data across multiple vCenter Server systems. S

Step 8 > If you join a group, enter the fully qualified domain name and LDAP port number of any remote vCenter Server system.

Step 9 > Enter the port numbers that you want to use or accept the default port numbers.

Step 10 > Select the size of your vCenter Server inventory to allocate memory for several Java services that are used by vCenter Server. This setting determines the maximum JVM heap settings for VMware VirtualCenter Management Webservices (Tomcat), Inventory Service, and Profile-Driven Storage Service. You can adjust this setting after installation if the number of hosts in your environment changes. See the recommendations in the vCenter Server Hardware Requirements topic in System Requirements.

Step 11 > (Optional) In the Ready to Install the Program window, select Select to bump up the ephemeral port value. This option increases the number of available ephemeral ports. If your vCenter Server manages hosts on which you will power on more than 2000 virtual machines simultaneously, this option prevents the pool of available ephemeral ports from being exhausted.

Step 12 > Click Install. Installation might take several minutes. Multiple progress bars appear during the installation of the selected components.

Step 13 > Click Finish.

A fellow VCI who was teaching the vSphere 5 What's New training course got a question from a student asking what happens to resource pools when vCenter goes down, because with vSphere 5.0 all the setting for resource pools are "moved" to vCenter.

Andy Cary who works as a Senior Technical Trainer at VMware responded immediately with: I created a RP on my vCenter and turned off expandable reservations for memory. Placed VM1 under said resource pool and failed to power up because the VM need to reserve memory for the overhead of running the VM (had no reservations set on the RP). So next I directly connected to the host and powered on the VM with no problem at all. However when you go back to the vCenter it displays:

 

The Cluster with the RP is now invalid because it can see the VM has powered on. So the configuration about DRS RP is saved on the vCenter but it doesn’t stop you going directly to the host an powering on the VM. Now in vSphere 5.0 if you directly connect to a host and try and create a local resource pool it will throw up an error saying this isn’t allowed because it can see you are managed by vCenter, this is the case even if the Host isn’t a member of DRS cluster. So the creation and management of RP is done via vCenter, if vCenter goes down the rules cannot be applied so you could get admin powering on VMs by directly connecting to the hosts. So in summary all we have done is said “You can only create, modify resource pools via vCenter and not by directly connecting to the host”

Logging in vSphere 5.0 has been significantly enhanced. You now have fine-grained control over system logs, the location where logs are sent, and, for each log, default size and rotation policy. You can set up logging with the vSphere Client or with the esxcli system syslog command and the PowerCLI VMHostSysLogServer Commandlets. You can also set up logging behaviour for a host by using the Host Profiles interface in the vSphere Client and can then import that host profile into other hosts.

VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0 hosts run a syslog service (vmsyslogd) which provides a standard mechanism for logging messages from the VMkernel and other system components. By default in ESXi, these logs are placed on a local scratch volume or a ram disk. To preserve the logs further, ESXi can be configured to place these logs to an alternate storage location on disk, and to send the logs across the network to a syslog server.

You have to install the vSphere Syslog Collector to enable ESXi system logs to be directed to a server on the network, rather than to a local disk. It’s possible install the Syslog Collector on the same machine as the associated vCenter Server, or on a different machine that has network connection to the vCenter Server. The Syslog Collector service binds to an IPv4 address for communication with vCenter Server, and does not support IPv6. The vCenter Server can be on a host machine in an IPv4-only, IPv4/IPv6 mixed-mode, or IPv6-only network environment, but the machine that connects to the vCenter Server through the vSphere Client must have an IPv4 address for the Syslog Collector service to work.

In the ESXi Software panel there's an Advanced Setting called Syslog.global.LogHost, the value of this setting presents the remote host to which syslog messages are forwarded and port on which the remote host receives syslog messages. You can include the protocol and the port, for example, ssl://hostName1:514. UDP (default), TCP, and SSL are supported. The remote host must have syslog installed and correctly configured to receive the forwarded syslog messages. Checkout the video how the syslog service is installed on the vCenter host.

You can also set up ESXi Syslog from the Host Profiles Interface. Hosts provisioned with Auto Deploy usually do not have sufficient local storage to save system logs. You can specify a remote syslog server for those hosts by setting up a reference host, saving the host profile, and applying that host profile to other hosts as needed. Best practice is to set up the syslog server on the reference host with the vSphere Client or the esxcli system syslog command and save the host profile. In some situations, setting up syslog from the Host Profiles interface is an alternative.

VMware supports in-place upgrades on 64-bit systems from vCenter Server 4.x to vCenter Server 5.0. You can upgrade VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 6 or later and vCenter Server 4.0.x to vCenter Server 5.0 by installing vCenter Server 5.0 on a new machine and migrating the existing database.

This upgrade method makes it possible to upgrade from a 32-bit system to a 64-bit system. Alternatively, if the VirtualCenter or vCenter Server database is on a remote machine, you can upgrade the database. vCenter Server 5.0 can manage ESX 3.5.x/ESXi 3.5.x hosts in the same cluster with ESX 4.x/ESXi 4.x hosts.

You cannot upgrade a vCenter Server 4.x instance that is running on Windows XP Professional x64 Edition to vCenter Server 5.0, because vCenter Server 5.0 does not support Windows XP Professional x64. This article provides information about upgrading to vCenter Server 5.0.

VMware KB: Upgrading to vCenter Server 5.0 best practices

What are datastore heartbeats?

The host-X-hb (where X is the host’s MOID) is Located on each heartbeat datastore, this file is used to check for slave liveness through the heartbeat datastore. This file is checked by the master host if the master loses network heartbeats from the slave.
 
For VMFS datastores, the vSphere HA agent locks this file with an exclusive lock and relies on the VMkernel heartbeat to indicate liveness. For NFS datastores, vSphere HA periodically updates the time stamp to this file to indicate liveness.

The host-X-poweron (where X is the host’s MOID) is a per-host file that contains the list of all virtual machines that are powered on. This file is used as a communication channel if a management network outage occurs. Isolated slaves use this file to tell the master that it is isolated as well as to tell the master which virtual machines it has powered off.

The master host must determine whether the slave host:

• Actually crashed
• Is not responding because of a network failure
• The HA agent is in an unreachable state

The absence of both a network and datastore heartbeat indicates full host failure. Datastores are used as a backup communication channel to detect virtual machine and host heartbeats. Datastore heartbeats are used to make the distinction between a failed, an isolated or a partitioned host.

vCenter Chargeback Manager is an end-to-end cost reporting solution for virtual environments that are using VMware vSphere. vCenter Chargeback Manager provides functionality to define unit costs and calculate the overall costs based on the actual usage or reservation of computing resources. This Web-based application interacts with the vCenter Server Database to retrieve usage information, calculates the cost by using the defined chargeback formulas, and generates cost and usage reports.

vCenter Chargeback Manager runs on an Apache Tomcat server instance. Users interact with vCenter Chargeback Manager through a load balancer (Apache HTTP Server). vCenter Chargeback Manager connects to the vCenter Chargeback Manager database that stores application-specific information, such as the defined chargeback hierarchies, cost models, users, roles, and so on. The application interacts with the vCenter Server using VIM APIs and with the vCenter Server database through a data collector. The data collector communicates with the vCenter Server Database using JDBC.

Continue reading "VMware has released vCenter Chargeback Manager..." »

vSphere supports several command‐line interfaces for managing your virtual infrastructure including the vSphere Command‐Line Interface (vCLI), a set of ESXi Shell commands, and PowerCLI. You can choose the CLI set best suited for your needs, and write scripts to automate your CLI tasks.

The vCLI command set includes vicfg- commands and ESXCLI commands. The ESXCLI commands included in the vCLI package are equivalent to the ESXCLI commands available on the ESXi Shell. The vicfg command set is similar to the deprecated esxcfg- command set in the ESXi Shell.

You can manage many aspects of an ESXi host with the ESXCLI command set. You can run ESXCLI commands as vCLI commands or run them in the ESXi Shell in troubleshooting situations. You can also run ESXCLI commands from the PowerCLI shell by using the Get-EsxCli cmdlet. See the vSphere PowerCLI Administration Guide and the vSphere PowerCLI Reference. The set of ESXCLI commands available on a host depends on the host configuration. The vSphere Command‐Line Interface Reference lists help information for all ESXCLI commands. Run esxcli --server <MyESXi> --help before you run a command on a host to verify that the command is defined on the host you are targeting. You can use this link to get your copy of the VMware ESXi 5.0 Reference Poster Continue reading "Video - Using the ESXI 5.0 vCLI Command Set " »