Deployment Workflow and Component Installation

VMware vSphere 6.5 is a sophisticated product with several components to install and set up. Understanding the correct sequence of tasks required to install and configure vSphere is the key to a successful deployment. The chapter starts by explaining the components of vSphere with their roles and services provided. We will walk-through the main aspects to consider for the preparation of a deployment plan for your environment, analyzing the criteria for hardware platform selection, storage and network requirements.

The host deployment plan will then describe the different ways to install ESXi, including Auto Deploy, and other solutions for deploying the host part. We'll also detail the deployment of Platform Services Controller (PSC), vCenter Server, and other components, including the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) solution...

vSphere components and workflow

To provide services to the infrastructure, vSphere relies on two core components—the hypervisor, which is the virtualization layer for the complete environment, and vCenter Server, which centralizes the management of the ESXi hosts and allows administrators to automate and secure the virtual infrastructure. To complete the vSphere deployment, it is essential to know the interaction between ESXi and vCenter. Let's examine these two components to figure out their role:

• The ESXi hypervisor is the virtual platform on which virtual machines and virtual appliances run. Its main function is to provide the resources to workloads in terms of CPU and RAM. To manage the ESXi resources, ensuring performance and reliability, an additional component is necessary—vCenter Server.
• vCenter Server is a service that centrally manages ESXi hosts...

ESXi deployment plan

A successful vSphere deployment requires an appropriate plan to avoid problems of incompatibility, performance, and instability with the commitment of remaining within the available budget.

Three main areas should be considered when planning a vSphere deployment:

• Choosing the hardware platform
• Identification of the storage architecture and protocols (NFS, iSCSI, FC, or FCoE)
• Network configuration (number of NICs, FC adapters, 1GBoE, or 10GBoE NICs)

Choosing the hardware platform

An important decision to take when planning an ESXi deployment is the choice of the hardware platform of the server. ESXi doesn't support all the hardware available on the market (storage controllers, NICs, and so on) and...

ESXi installation

Once you have defined the hardware platform and the storage and network setup, you are ready to deploy the ESXi host. The installation is pretty simple and takes only a few minutes. The latest release of vSphere made an important enhancement in terms of security, introducing a new feature for the hypervisor—secure boot. Secure boot is a solution that ensures that only trusted code is loaded by the EFI firmware before the OS boots. The trust is given by the UEFI firmware that validates the digitally signed ESXi kernel against a digital certificate stored in the UEFI firmware.

Once you have defined the design of the virtual infrastructure, you should evaluate which installation option is suitable for your environment. vSphere 6.5 offers three options to deploy ESXi:

• Interactive: Manually providing answers to installation options
• Unattended: Using installation...

vCenter Server components

vCenter Server is a service that centralizes the management of the ESXi hosts and the VM that run on the hypervisor. This vSphere core component interacts not only with ESXi hypervisors, but also integrates with other VMware products—vRealize Automation, Site Recovery Manager, and vSphere Update Manager, just to give you some examples.

vCenter Server is not limited to act as a central management tool only. The advanced features such as sign-on server (SSO), centralized authentication, vMotion, DRS, HA, and FT are all services that come into play only when vCenter Server is present in the infrastructure. With vCenter Server, you have the capability to manage resources, ESXi hosts, VM, templates, logs and stats, alarms and events, and so on. In addition, vCenter Server provides all the functionalities needed to distribute and manage the network services...

vCenter Server deployment

vCenter Server can be installed on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 SP1 or later, Microsoft Windows Server 2016 included. Starting with vSphere 6.5, vCenter Server supports a mixed IPv4 and IPv6 environment. This means that you can connect vCenter Server with an IPv4 address to vCenter Server with an IPv6 address.

Both vCenter and PSC require IP and name settings. If you use a fully qualified domain name (FQDN), you will not be able to change it later (neither for vCenter and PSC). If you just use an IP (not recommended), you will not able to change it anymore.

Before proceeding with the installation, make sure all vSphere components have their clocks synchronized to avoid issues in communication between network machines due to the SSL certificates, which are time sensitive.

To avoid security problems, the use of a dedicated account for the vCenter Server...

vCSA deployment

vCSA is a prepackaged and preinstalled Photon Linux-based VM that provides vCenter and PSC services. As compared with old versions, vCSA now offers the same capabilities provided by the Windows-based version plus some exclusive services such as native high availability, native backup and restore, a migration tool, and improved appliance management.

With vSphere 6.5 Update 1, you can run the vCSA GUI and CLI installers on Microsoft Windows 2012 x64 bit, Microsoft Windows 2012 R2 x64 bit, Microsoft Windows 2016 x64 bit, and macOS Sierra. The new capabilities make the appliance complete and ready to take over the Windows-based version.

The following is a short description of new features introduced in vSphere 6.5:

• Native high availability: This feature, available for vCSA only, is a solution to provide HA to your vCenter. You could have the active vCSA in one data...

Summary

For the successful deployment of VMware vSphere 6.5, understanding all the involved steps not only ensures the correct sizing of the hardware components, but helps to avoid potential misconfigurations.

This chapter walked-through the core components of vSphere 6.5, explaining the roles and services provided. The ESXi host is responsible for providing resources to workloads while the vCenter Server is used to manage hosts and resource availability. To ensure a successful deployment, a deployment plan must be drawn up in order to define the correct hardware platform to use, storage architecture and protocols, and network configuration.

We explained in detail the different installation methods available to users for vSphere components to finalize the deployment. There are three ways to install ESXi hosts depending on the environment size—interactive installation, unattended...