Chapter 9. Managing vCenter Server

If you have more than one ESXi server, a vCenter Server will make your ESXi servers much easier to manage. A vCenter Server will also add a lot of additional features, such as HA and DRS clusters, to your vSphere environment. In this chapter, we will discuss some topics that will help you manage your vSphere environment.

The following topics are covered in this chapter:

• Working with roles and permissions

• Managing licenses

• Configuring alarms

• Retrieving events

Working with roles and permissions

In a VMware vSphere environment, you might want to give certain permissions to users or administrators, who are not a part of the vSphere administrator's team, to perform specific tasks. For example, you might want to give the administrators of a server the permission to power on and off the server. You don't want to give these administrators all the privileges in your environment because you will lose control over it. There are many privileges you can give to somebody, and you probably want to give only a few. If you assigned privileges to users directly, it would be hard to see who has which privileges.

VMware vSphere has a nice feature named roles. Roles are a collection of privileges that you will need to perform a certain task. You can create a role named Server administrator and assign the Power On and Power Off privileges to this role. Every time you want to give an administrator the rights to power on and off a server, you can assign the Server administrator...

Managing licenses

While writing this book, there are no PowerCLI cmdlets to add, retrieve, update, or remove licenses. You have to use the vSphere API to manage licenses in PowerCLI. There is only one cmdlet in PowerCLI for license management, Get-LicenseDataManager, and the only thing this cmdlet does is exposes a hidden vSphere API. The syntax of the Get-LicenseDataManager cmdlet is as follows:

Get-LicenseDataManager [[-Server] <VIServer[]>]
    [<CommonParameters>]

The Get-LicenseDataManager cmdlet has no required parameters.

You will use the vSphere API objects LicenseManager, LicenseAssignmentManager, and the hidden LicenseDataManager object to manage licenses.

You need to use LicenseManager to manage licenses in the license inventory on your vCenter Server. You can use LicenseAssignmentManager to manage the assignment of licenses to the ESXi servers. You use LicenseDataManager to associate licenses with containers in your vSphere environment and enable automatic license...

Configuring alarms

In a vSphere environment, there are conditions (such as datastores running out of space) that you want to know about before things run out of control. In the datastores running out of space example, you would want to be warned before the datastore is full, so you can move some disks to another datastore to create extra free space on the datastore that is running out of space.

VMware vSphere provides alarms that trigger warnings and alerts when certain conditions are met. There are a lot of predefined alarms for almost every condition possible in vCenter Server. For example, there is the Datastore usage on disk alarm for datastores that will, by default, give you a warning if a datastore usage is more than 75 %and give you an alert if a datastore usage is more than 85 %. It is also possible to define actions such as Send a notification email that are executed when an alarm is triggered.

In PowerCLI, there are various cmdlets to modify alarm definitions and to create and modify...

Retrieving events

The Get-VIEvent cmdlet can be used to retrieve information about the events on a vCenter Server system. The syntax of the Get-VIEvent cmdlet is as follows:

Get-VIEvent [[-Entity] <VIObject[]>] [-Start <DateTime>] [-Finish
    <DateTime>] [-Username <String>] [-MaxSamples <Int32>] [-Types
    <EventCategory[]>] [-Server <VIServer[]>] [<CommonParameters>]

The Get-VIEvent cmdlet has no required parameters.

If you don't specify a value for the -Start, -End, and -MaxSamples parameters, the default maximum number of objects returned will be 100. If you want to specify the maximum value possible for the -MaxSamples parameter, you can use -MaxSamples ([int]::MaxValue). This is a .NET notation, and it is the equivalent of 2,147,483,647.

You can specify Error, Info, or Warning as the value of the -Types parameter in order to retrieve the events of the specified types only. For example, to retrieve a maximum of 50 error events...

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to use PowerCLI to manage your vSphere environment with vCenter Server. Topics such as retrieving privileges, using roles, using permissions, managing licenses, using the LicenseDataManager object, modifying alarm definitions, creating alarm actions, creating alarm action triggers, retrieving events, and configuring the vCenter Server mail server and sender settings were discussed.

In the following chapter, we will learn about managing VMware vCloud Director and vCloud Air.