Today, we will discuss on how to install and configure vSphere Replication solution. vSphere Replication is the native replication solution designed for data protection and recovery in vSphere environments. The solution is requires no additional license and supports vSphere deployments from vSphere Essentials Plus to vSphere Enterprise Plus. We will be configuring 2 separate sites connected through Embedded Link mode for the deployment (No external PSCs). First we need to download the ISO file containing the replication appliance OVA. The file is located at my.vmware.com under All Products –> VMware vSphere. After downloading the ISO, mount it from the local PC. If you browse to the mount location you will…
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Upgrade vSphere Environment Part 2 – Upgrade ESXi Hosts to v6.7
Now that we have upgraded our vCenter Server, we can proceed to upgrade our ESXi hosts. First, let’s look at various options available for upgrade ESXi hosts. There are several different ways to upgrade an ESXi hosts as listed below, Upgrade ESXi host using installation media (DCUI, CLI or Script) Upgrade ESXi host using vSphere Update Manager Upgrade ESXi host using Auto deploy From those methods we will discuss about upgrading ESXi hosts using vSphere Update Manager and using installation media (DCUI). Before upgrade process begins you should verify the system meets the upgrade requirements. You can refer reference links to verify upgrade requirements. Then we need to prepare the…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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Install & Configure: VMware ESXi Hypervisor 6.5
Today we will walk through Installation and configuration steps for vSphere ESXi version 6.5 and we will need following items to continue, VMware ESXi Hypervisor installation ISO – Can be obtained from my.vmware.com. Compatible hardware device (or a virtual machine in a lab environment) – Check VMware HCL for compatible hardware devices. ESXi Installation requires following hardware and system resources, Host machine should have at least 2 CPU cores. Minimum required physical memory is 4GB and Recommended to have at least 8 GB of RAM. Boot device should have at least 1GB of space. Intel XD or AMD NX bit to be enabled in BIOS. Hardware virtualization (Intel VT-x or…
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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…
