With the growth of VMware ecosystem with components such as VSAN and NSX, vCenter Server has become a critical component of vSphere environment. Therefore, VMware has provided a simple way to backup vCenter Server appliance as needed and according to the BCP guidelines of the institution. vCenter Server Appliance supports file-based backup over protocols such as FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, SFTP, NFS, and SMB. We need to provide a remote location as backup destination and VCSA does not retain any backups locally. So let’s start the configuration. I am using an FTP endpoint as a backup location. First, we need to log into the vCenter Server Appliance Management Interface. Then,…
-
-
How to Migrate vCenter Server from v5.5 to v6.5
VMware has ended general support for vSphere version 5.5 on September 19th 2018 and suggested to upgrade existing versions to v6.5. Today we will look at how to migrate existing vCenter v5.5 instanceto v6.5. I have chosen to migrate from a windows vCenter to a vCenter appliance since those are the popular/preferred installations of their respective versions. First, as usual we need to download the vCenter Server Appliance installation binary from my.vmware.com. Once you have complete your download, mount the ISO image and then navigate to the mounted CDROM. From there copy the folder named “migration assistant” into your vCenter 5.5 Server. After copy operation completed, navigate inside “migration assistant”…
-
Upgrade vSphere Environment Part 1 – Upgrade vCenter Server Appliance to v6.7
Currently, we have deployed a vSphere environment with one vCenter Server appliance v6.5 with external PSC and 3 ESXi 6.5 hosts. VMware has released the latest upgrade for vSphere platform on April 2018. So let’s upgrade our environment to the version 6.7 as well. In this post we will discuss about the method of upgrading vCenter server and we will upgrade ESXi hosts later in a separate post. You should always upgrade vCenter server before upgrading ESXi hosts as vCenter cannot manage hosts which are higher in version. Major version upgrades to vCenter appliance can be consider as a migration as well. Since we have to deploy new VCSA and…
-
Add ESXi Hosts to a HA/DRS Cluster
During our previous posts we have installed and configured a vCenter Server and ESXi hosts. Now that we have our cluster configured with HA and DRS features, lets add our ESXi hosts to the cluster. First, right click on the cluster and select Add host. Then, provide the FQDN or the IP address of the host you need to add to the cluster. Click next to continue. Provide the username and password to connect to the host and click next to continue. You will get a prompt about validation of host certification. Accept it to continue. Wizard will provide a summary of information about the host. Click next to continue.…
-
Configure HA/DRS Cluster
Now we have a vCenter Server configured and running with an external PSC but we are yet to add hosts to the vCenter and enable vSphere features like vSphere HA and DRS. What is vSphere High Availability vSphere HA is a feature enabled at the vSphere cluster level to reduce unplanned downtimes. vSphere HA can protect applications availability in following ways, It can protect virtual machines against a server failure by restarting affected VMs on a another available host. It can protect against an application failure by continuously monitoring a virtual machine and resetting it once a failure was detected. vSphere HA can protect against a datastore accessibility failure by…
-
Install & Configure: VMware vCenter Server 6.5 with External PSC
Now we have multiple ESXi hosts installed and configured in our environment. Managing those ESXi hosts individually through host web client or vSphere legacy client can be a tedious task. Also you are missing features like vSphere HA, DRS, VM cloning and template management. Solution to all those problems is installing an vCenter server to centralize management of ESXi hosts. Now let’s install and configure VMware vCenter server v6.5. You can download a trial version of vCenter Server from my.vmware.com. Since the vSphere version 5.0 VMware offered an appliance version for vCenter but windows version had more capabilities and features. But from version 6.0 and 6.5 VMware has put more…
-
Introduction to VMware vSphere
VMware has introduced a broad range of products to use in virtualized environment to create a true software defined data center. Their products falls in many categories including datacenter and cloud infrastructure, infrastructure & operations management, network and security and application management etc. Out of those VMware vSphere is the core product portfolio from VMware. Over the years vSphere has grown exponentially with products like Operations manager, Replication, data protection and NSX. Today we will discuss about two products from vSphere which common to all their licensing categories. VMware ESXi Hypervisor ESXi (or previously known as ESX) is the founding stone to their almost all the products. It’s a type…
