Preface

This book will provide the knowledge of vSphere 6.5 required in order to build, manage, and simply better understand such environments.

Using real-world scenarios, this book acts as a reference guide and possible baseline for each virtualization project based on VMware vSphere. Written by VMware vExperts and certified people, this book is an indispensable guide for each vSphere professional.

This book tries to fill the gaps in existing documentation, which in some cases is too in depth, with an organic approach and overview.

This book will quickly move from the design and plan to the deployment and management aspects of vSphere 6.5, considering its new features and capabilities. Then, we will explain the fundamentals in a fast-paced manner, which will help you by deep diving into the advanced functionalities. Toward the end, we will cover advanced vSphere security features, business continuity, availability, data protection, high availability, monitoring, patching, upgrading, and troubleshooting techniques.

What this book covers

This book is structured in three main parts, starting with a high-level approach, then going in deep on configuration and management aspects, and finally with some aspects related to the maintaining.

Part 1 – From the Basics to Design

Chapter 1, Evolution of VMware vSphere Suite, provides a general overview of all the products, solutions, and features of the vSphere 6.5 suite, comparing the evolutions with the previous releases. Also, this chapter explains the reasons to choose (and why not to choose) vSphere 6.5 compared with previous versions or other products. Finally, it includes a general overview of all the products, solutions, and features in other VMware products and different suites that could be complementary or where vSphere represents an infrastructural foundation.

Chapter 2, Design and Plan a Virtualization Infrastructure, explains how to approach a virtualization project using reference architectures and best practices, from the analysis of requirements, constraints, and risks to the different types of design (conceptual, logical, and physical). Network and storage aspects are discussed, as well as different vCenter Server and ESXi design and planning aspects. Three different scenarios are used as examples—SMB, Enterprise, and ROBO.

Chapter 3, Analysis and Assessment of an Existing Environment, explains how to analyse and assess an existing physical or virtual environment in order to gain the data needed to plan a migration, upgrade, or improvement. Different tools and approaches will be described as ways to reach this goal.

Part 2 – From Deployment to Management

Chapter 4, Deployment Workflow and Component Installation, starts with network and storage requirements, host and environment preparation, and then the different ways to install ESXi, including Auto Deploy and other solutions for deploying the host part. It also details the deployment of PSC, vCenter Server, and other components, including vCSA solutions and specific features and capabilities of the new version, 6.5.

Chapter 5, Configuring and Managing vSphere 6.5, describes the different ways to manage a vSphere 6.5 infrastructure, including the new HTML5 clients, with an introduction to the scripting and automation tools. ESXi, vCenter, VMware cluster-related configuration, and management topics are also covered in this part.

Chapter 6, Advanced Network Management, is dedicated to virtual networking, both with standard and distributed virtual switches and covers the design, management, and optimization of the virtual networks. A brief introduction to new network trends, including NV, NFV, SDS, and how NSX could improve a vSphere environment is also given.

Chapter 7, Advanced Storage Management, is dedicated to the storage part of a virtual infrastructure. Starting from local block-based storage and moving on to shared block storage with FC, FCoE, and iSCSI protocols and NFS-based NAS storage. For each of them, we consider different optimization techniques, integration, and storage features provided by vSphere. Other types of storage architectures are also considered, especially HCI solutions. Storage caching and new types of storage, such as virtual NVMe devices, are also covered.

Chapter 8, Advanced VM and Resource Management, introduces the practices and procedures involved in configuring and managing of VMs in a vSphere infrastructure. Different types of VM provisioning are considered, including templates, Content Library, VA, and vApps. This chapter will also provide a comprehensive view of vSphere resources management, including reservations, limits, and shares, and how to balance and optimize them in your environment. Finally, we discuss the different migration techniques to move your workload across different environments.

Part 3 – Maintain a Virtual Infrastructure

Chapter 9, Monitoring, Optimizing, and Troubleshooting, covers the native tools used for monitor and troubleshoot performance and other issues in order to improve the VM and the workloads. The chapter focuses on monitoring different critical resources, such as computing, storage, and networking across the ESXi hosts, the resource pools, and clusters. Other tools, such as vRealize Operations and third-party tools, are also briefly described.

Chapter 10, Securing and Protecting Your Environment, explains that, in addition to the security and hardening aspects of vSphere, the new 6.5 version introduces some new, important features related to this aspect, such as VM Encryption, Encrypted vMotion, Secure Boot Support for VMs, and Secure Boot Plus Cryptographic Hypervisor Assurance for ESXi. In addition, vSphere 6.5 introduces audit-quality logging for vSphere events.

Chapter 11, Lifecycle Management, Patching, and Upgrading, explains that with vSphere 6.5, administrators will find significantly more powerful capabilities for patching, upgrading, and managing the configuration of the VM using Update Manager and host profile features. We will also cover the upgrade path and consideration to upgrade or migrate your VM.

Part 4 – Match Your Business Continuity and Service Levels

Chapter 12, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery, describes what's behind normal operation and maintenance in order to define your business continuity requirements and match your expected service levels. Availability, SLA, data and system protection, disaster recovery, and other basics concepts are described in this chapter, with a brief introduction of SRM and SR as a solution for DR.

Chapter 13, Advanced Availability in vSphere 6.5, focuses on specific availability (and resiliency) solutions in vSphere, including the new vSphere High Availability (HA) features, proactive HA, vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT), and other solutions, such as guest clustering.

Chapter 14, Data and Workloads Protection, provides some information on how to save your configuration, data, and workload from your virtual infrastructure. VMware is discontinuing VMware vSphere Data Protection (VDP), a general-purpose backup product included with vSphere, making the related ecosystem the proper way to manage those aspects.

What you need for this book

This book assumes a basic level of VMware vSphere and virtualization knowledge in order to understand all the concepts.

This book requires the following minimum software components: VMware vSphere 6.5 U1, VMware vCenter Server 6.5 U1, and other optional software.

This book was written in late 2017 (from August to November) using the vSphere 6.5 Update 1 version as a reference. New updates or patches may change some of commands, settings, behaviors, or considerations, so be sure to always verify the release notes of each update.
When applicable, we have used the vSphere Client (the new HTML5 client), but it is still incomplete; for this reason, in some parts of this book, the vSphere Web Client is used instead of the vSphere Client.

The best way to practice without the need for software licenses or hardware components is to try the VMware Hands-on-Labs (https://labs.hol.vmware.com/), which cover different products and technologies. The first ones that you should use, if you are new to new features of vSphere 6.5, are:

• HOL-1710-SDC-1 - Introduction to vSphere v6.5
• HOL-1710-SDC-6 - What's New: vSphere 6.5

If you prefer your own lab, there are several hints which type of hardware, if using a big server, with all nested VM and hosts, or a cloud service, for example, Ravello (which can also host nested ESXi). There are also suggestions on how to deploy all software components. One interesting way is using AutoLab (http://www.labguides.com/autolab/), but version 2.6 does not support vSphere 6.5; or just look on the blogs of Alan Renouf and William Lam, where you can found some powerful scripts to build an entire vSphere 6.5 (also with vSAN and NSX!).

Who this book is for

To make use of the contents of this book, a basic prior knowledge of VMware vSphere and virtualization is expected.

This book is for users such as data center administrators and IT architects who have already worked with the VMware vSphere platform, perhaps previous versions, and want to know more about vSphere 6.5.

The audience will be technical and focused on the architecture and may be VMware Certified Professionals (VCPs) or higher.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning. Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "We used the command Get-VM to retrieve a list of running VMs in the vCenter Server instance."

A block of code is set as follows:

Get-VM | Select-Object Name,NumCPU,MemoryMB,PowerState,Host | Export-CSV VMinfo.csv -NoTypeInformation

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

ppm install XML-LibXML

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Right-click on the host once again and select the All vCenter Actions | Remove from Inventory option"

Warnings or important notes appear like this.

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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