Mastering VMware vsphere 6 7

Chapter 1 • Introducing VMware vSphere 6.7 .........................1 Exploring VMware vSphere 6.7................................................1 Examining the Products in the vSphere Suite..................................3 Examining the Features in VMware vSphere..................................8 Licensing VMware vSphere................................................17 Why Choose vSphere?.......................................................20 The Bottom Line............................................................22 Chapter 2 • Planning and Installing VMware ESXi ....................23 VMware ESXi Architecture...................................................23 Understanding the ESXi Hypervisor........................................23 Examining the ESXi Components...........................................24 Planning a VMware vSphere Deployment......................................25 Choosing a Server Platform................................................26 Determining a Storage Architecture.........................................28 Integrating with the Network Infrastructure .................................29 Deploying VMware ESXi ....................................................30 Installing VMware ESXi Interactively .......................................31 Performing an Unattended Installation of VMware ESXi.......................35 Deploying VMware ESXi with vSphere Auto Deploy..........................38 Performing Postinstallation Configuration.....................................40 Reconfiguring the Management Network ...................................40 Using the vSphere Host Client .............................................42 Configuring Time Synchronization .........................................43 Configuring Name Resolution .............................................45 The Bottom Line............................................................46 Chapter 3 • Installing and Configuring vCenter Server ................47 Introducing vCenter Server ..................................................47 Centralizing User Authentication Using vCenter Single SignOn................49 Understanding the Platform Services Controller..............................52 Using the vSphere Web Client for Administration ............................53 Providing an Extensible Framework ........................................54 Choosing the Version of vCenter Server........................................55 Planning and Designing a vCenter Server Deployment ..........................56 Sizing Hardware for vCenter Server ........................................56 Planning for vCenter Server Availability.....................................58

MasteringVMware vSphere® 6.7

Mastering VMware vSphere® 6.7

Nick Marshall Mike Brown

G Blair Fritz Ryan Johnson

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

I dedicate this book to my family My wife Natalie, my son Ethan, and my daughters, Estelle and Eve.

You are the reason I do what I do

—Nick Marshall

What a journey it has been the last few years since my previous Mastering vSphere book When completing the last book, I had just moved to Palo Alto, California from Australia and was awaiting the arrival of my second child The opportunity had come up to work out of VMware’s headquarters on a beautiful campus not far from Stanford University However, after a fantastic 2.5 years in the US, it was time to move back closer to our family in Australia

When writing my last book, I spoke about my wife being my rock, and that has not changed Our life is somehow even more chaotic with three kids, yet she amazingly handles it all in her stride Nat, you are still my everything; I owe you more than I could possibly repay, but I hope a remote tropical holiday for two might be a good first step

Thanks to my fellow authors, work mates and good friends, Mike Brown, Blair Fritz, and Ryan Johnson You guys really knocked it out of the park with your contributions Your dedica-tion to refining and (re)writing your respective sections reinforces my respect for you as VMware authorities The content of this book is so much better thanks to your involvement. .  even if you didn’t know what you were getting yourselves into!

I’d also like to thank our technical editor, Rebecca Fitzhugh Thanks for keeping us honest, Rebecca Your technical review was most appreciated, and the feedback rightfully kept us

on our toes

Once again, the team at Wiley/Sybex have been so supportive Jim Minatel, thank you for your guidance and direction Stephanie Barton, thank you for graciously coming back and keeping our rambling streams of consciousness somewhat cohesive for a third time Also, to Athiyappan Kumar and the rest of the team, thank you for all that you did to ensure the quality

of this work Your attention to detail is second to none

As always, I’d like to thank the VMware community as a whole To all the bloggers, speakers, tweeters, and podcasters: without you all, I would never have started down this virtual road

—Nick Marshall

About the Author

Nick Marshall is a Senior Integration Architect with nearly 20 years of IT experience He is currently working for VMware in the Integrated Systems Business Unit

Previously, Nick has worked in a number of roles, ranging from computer assembler, to infrastructure architect, to product manager Nick loves to solve business problems with techni-cal solutions

Nick’s passion for virtualization is evident by his involvement in starting the most popular

virtualization podcast, vBrownBag, and writing on his personal blog, at www.nickmarshall.com.

au You can also find him speaking at industry conferences such as VMworld, VMUG (VMware User Group), and PEX (Partner Exchange) To recognize his contributions to the VMware community, Nick has been awarded the vExpert award each year since 2012

Outside of his day job, Nick has a budding interest in woodworking, professional audio and video production, and volunteering at his local church

Nick lives in Melbourne, Australia with his wife, Natalie, and their three children, Ethan, Estelle, and Eve

About the Contributors

The following individuals also contributed to this book

Mike Brown (Chapters 5 and 6) is a Senior SDDC Integration Architect in VMware’s Integrated Systems Business Unit He currently focuses on Architecture and Design for the core vSphere, Networking, and NSX components of the VMware Validated Designs

Mike is a double VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX #71) in Datacenter and Network Virtualization He also holds many other industry certifications He has been awarded the VMware vExpert award each year since 2011

Mike has been working in IT since 1997 where he worked for a small VAR Since then he has worked both in a customer environment and also as a consultant for a few local companies before joining VMware’s Professional Services team in 2012 Since joining VMware, Mike spent two years as a Senior Consultant before moving into the vCloud Suite Technical Marketing Team where he spent another two years before moving into the VMware Validated Design

Blair has been working in IT since 2003 where he started his adventures by working at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis Since then, he’s had over 15 years of experience as a support engineer and technologist, ranging from systems engineer, staff escalation engineer, technical lead, and solutions architect roles

Blair lives in Indianapolis, Indiana with his wonderful wife, Jenny, and their two dogs, Theo and Olive When he isn’t working, you’ll likely find him bike riding, playing tennis, or playing Dungeons and Dragons

Ryan Johnson (Chapters 11, 12, and 14) is a Senior Solutions Architect in the Integrated Systems Business Unit at VMware where he is an architect, author, and product owner for both the VMware Validated Designs and VMware Cloud Foundation

Ryan has over 23 years of experience as a technologist, ranging from systems engineer, enterprise architect, and solutions architect roles

Ryan lives in Tallahassee, Florida with his incredibly patient wife, Darcie, and their two creative boys, Nolan and Parker You are likely to find him on one of many nearby trails

Contents at a Glance

Foreword xxiii

Introduction xxv

Chapter 1 • Introducing VMware vSphere 6.7 1

Chapter 2 • Planning and Installing VMware ESXi 23

Chapter 3 • Installing and Configuring vCenter Server 47

Chapter 4 • vSphere Update Manager and the vCenter Support Tools 117

Chapter 5 • Creating and Configuring a vSphere Network 179

Chapter 6 • Creating and Configuring Storage Devices 265

Chapter 7 • Ensuring High Availability and Business Continuity 369

Chapter 8 • Securing VMware vSphere 433

Chapter 9 • Creating and Managing Virtual Machines 495

Chapter 10 • Using Templates and vApps 549

Chapter 11 • Managing Resource Allocation 591

Chapter 12 • Balancing Resource Utilization 645

Chapter 13 • Monitoring VMware vSphere Performance 697

Chapter 14 • Automating VMware vSphere 735

Appendix A • The Bottom Line 775

Index 801

Foreword xxiii

Introduction xxv

Chapter 1 • Introducing VMware vSphere 6.7 1

Exploring VMware vSphere 6.7 1

Examining the Products in the vSphere Suite 3

Examining the Features in VMware vSphere 8

Licensing VMware vSphere 17

Why Choose vSphere? 20

The Bottom Line 22

Chapter 2 • Planning and Installing VMware ESXi 23

VMware ESXi Architecture 23

Understanding the ESXi Hypervisor 23

Examining the ESXi Components 24

Planning a VMware vSphere Deployment 25

Choosing a Server Platform 26

Determining a Storage Architecture 28

Integrating with the Network Infrastructure 29

Deploying VMware ESXi 30

Installing VMware ESXi Interactively 31

Performing an Unattended Installation of VMware ESXi 35

Deploying VMware ESXi with vSphere Auto Deploy 38

Performing Post-installation Configuration 40

Reconfiguring the Management Network 40

Using the vSphere Host Client 42

Configuring Time Synchronization 43

Configuring Name Resolution 45

The Bottom Line 46

Chapter 3 • Installing and Configuring vCenter Server 47

Introducing vCenter Server 47

Centralizing User Authentication Using vCenter Single Sign-On 49

Understanding the Platform Services Controller 52

Using the vSphere Web Client for Administration 53

Providing an Extensible Framework 54

Choosing the Version of vCenter Server 55

Planning and Designing a vCenter Server Deployment 56

Sizing Hardware for vCenter Server 56

Planning for vCenter Server Availability 58

Running vCenter Server and Its Components as VMs 60

Installing vCenter Server and Its Components 63

Installing vCenter Server in an Enhanced Linked Mode Group 74

Exploring vCenter Server 77

The vSphere Web Client Home Screen 78

Using the Navigator 80

Creating and Managing a vCenter Server Inventory 80

Understanding Inventory Views and Objects 80

Creating and Adding Inventory Objects 83

Exploring vCenter Server’s Management Features 86

Understanding Basic Host Management 86

Examining Basic Host Configuration 89

Using Scheduled Tasks 93

Using the Events and Events Consoles in vCenter Server 95

Working with Host Profiles 95

Tags and Custom Attributes 99

Managing vCenter Server Settings 102

General vCenter Server Settings 102

Licensing 105

Message of the Day 106

Advanced Settings 106

Auto Deploy 106

vCenter HA 106

Key Management Servers 106

Storage Providers 106

vSphere Web Client Administration 106

Roles 107

Licensing 107

vCenter Solutions Manager 107

System Configuration 107

VMware Appliance Management Administration 109

Summary 110

Monitor 111

Access 113

Networking 113

Time 113

Services 113

Update 114

Administration 114

Syslog 114

Backup 115

The Bottom Line 115

Chapter 4 • vSphere Update Manager and the vCenter Support Tools 117

vSphere Update Manager 117

vSphere Update Manager and the vCenter Server Appliance 120

Installing the Update Manager Download Service (Optional) 121

The vSphere Update Manager Plug-in 122

Reconfiguring the VUM or UMDS Installation with the Update Manager Utility 123

Upgrading VUM from a Previous Version 124

Configuring vSphere Update Manager 124

Creating Baselines 130

Routine Updates 134

Attaching and Detaching Baselines or Baseline Groups 135

Performing a Scan 137

Staging Patches 141

Remediating Hosts 142

Upgrading VMware Tools 145

Upgrading Host Extensions 148

Upgrading Hosts with vSphere Update Manager 148

Importing an ESXi Image and Creating the Host Upgrade Baseline 148

Upgrading a Host 151

Upgrading VM Hardware 152

Performing an Orchestrated Upgrade 154

Investigating Alternative Update Options 155

Using vSphere Update Manager PowerCLI 155

Upgrading and Patching without vSphere Update Manager 156

vSphere Auto Deploy 157

Deploying Hosts with Auto Deploy 157

vCenter Support Tools 172

ESXi Dump Collector 172

Other vCenter Support Tools 175

The Bottom Line 176

Chapter 5 • Creating and Configuring a vSphere Network 179

Putting Together a vSphere Network 179

Working with vSphere Standard Switches 182

Comparing Virtual Switches and Physical Switches 183

Understanding Ports and Port Groups 184

Understanding Uplinks 186

Configuring the Management Network 189

Configuring VMkernel Networking 192

Enabling Enhanced Multicast Functions 197

Configuring TCP/IP Stacks 198

Configuring Virtual Machine Networking 200

Configuring VLANs 202

Configuring NIC Teaming 207

Using and Configuring Traffic Shaping 219

Bringing It All Together 220

Working with vSphere Distributed Switches 224

Creating a vSphere Distributed Switch 224

Removing an ESXi Host from a Distributed Switch 229

Removing a Distributed Switch 230

Managing Distributed Switches 231

Working with Distributed Port Groups 234

Managing VMkernel Adapters 240

Using NetFlow on vSphere Distributed Switches 245

Enabling Switch Discovery Protocols 247

Enabling Enhanced Multicast Functions 248

Setting Up Private VLANs 249

Configuring LACP 252

Configuring Virtual Switch Security 256

Understanding and Using Promiscuous Mode 257

Allowing MAC Address Changes and Forged Transmits 258

The Bottom Line 262

Chapter 6 • Creating and Configuring Storage Devices .265

Reviewing the Importance of Storage Design 265

Examining Shared Storage Fundamentals 267

Comparing Local Storage with Shared Storage 269

Defining Common Storage Array Architectures 271

Explaining RAID 273

Understanding vSAN 278

Understanding Midrange and External Enterprise Storage Array Design 282

Choosing a Storage Protocol 284

Making Basic Storage Choices 299

Implementing vSphere Storage Fundamentals 301

Reviewing Core vSphere Storage Concepts 302

Understanding Virtual Volumes 318

SCs vs LUNs 320

Storage Policies 320

Virtual Volumes 321

Working with VMFS Datastores 322

Working with Raw Device Mappings 337

Working with NFS Datastores 339

Working with vSAN 347

Working with Virtual Machine–Level Storage Configuration 349

Leveraging SAN and NAS Best Practices 361

The Bottom Line 366

Chapter 7 • Ensuring High Availability and Business Continuity 369

Understanding the Layers of High Availability 369

Clustering VMs 371

Introducing Network Load Balancing Clustering 371

Introducing Windows Server Failover Clustering 372

Implementing vSphere High Availability 384

Understanding vSphere High Availability Clusters 384

Understanding vSphere High Availability’s Core Components 385

Enabling vSphere HA 389

Configuring vSphere High Availability 393

Configuring vSphere HA Groups, Rules, Overrides, and Orchestrated VM Restart 409

Managing vSphere High Availability 413

Introducing vSphere SMP Fault Tolerance 415

Using vSphere SMP Fault Tolerance with vSphere High Availability 421

Examining vSphere Fault Tolerance Use Cases 421

Planning for Business Continuity 422

Providing Data Protection 422

Recovering from Disasters 426

Using vSphere Replication 427

The Bottom Line 432

Chapter 8 • Securing VMware vSphere 433

Overview of vSphere Security 433

Securing ESXi Hosts 434

Working with ESXi Authentication 434

Controlling Access to ESXi Hosts 439

Keeping ESXi Hosts Patched 447

Managing ESXi Host Permissions 447

Configuring ESXi Host Logging 455

Securing the ESXi Boot Process 456

Reviewing Other ESXi Security Recommendations 459

Securing vCenter Server 459

Managing vSphere Certificates 460

Working with Certificate Stores 460

Getting Started with Certificate Management 463

Authenticating Users with Single Sign-On 465

Understanding the vpxuser Account 469

Managing vCenter Server Permissions 470

Configuring vCenter Server Appliance Logging 482

Securing Virtual Machines 483

Configuring a Key Management Server for VM and VSAN Encryption 483

Virtual Trusted Platform Module 2.0 490

Configuring Network Security Policies 491

Keeping VMs Patched 492

The Bottom Line 492

Chapter 9 • Creating and Managing Virtual Machines 495

Understanding Virtual Machines 495

Examining Virtual Machines from the Inside 495

Examining Virtual Machines from the Outside 498

Creating a Virtual Machine 503

Choosing Values for Your New Virtual Machine 513

Sizing Virtual Machines 514

Naming Virtual Machines 516

Sizing Virtual Machine Hard Disks 516

Virtual Machine Graphics 518

Installing a Guest Operating System 518

Working with Installation Media 519

Using the Installation Media 521

Working in the Virtual Machine Console 523

Installing VMware Tools 524

Installing VMware Tools in Windows 525

Installing VMware Tools in Linux 529

Managing Virtual Machines 532

Adding or Registering Existing VMs 532

Changing VM Power States 534

Removing VMs 535

Deleting VMs 535

Modifying Virtual Machines 536

Changing Virtual Machine Hardware 536

Using Virtual Machine Snapshots 541

The Bottom Line 546

Chapter 10 • Using Templates and vApps 549

Cloning VMs 549

Creating a Customization Specification 550

Cloning a Virtual Machine 555

Introducing vSphere Instant Cloning 558

Creating Templates and Deploying Virtual Machines 561

Cloning a Virtual Machine to a Template 563

Deploying a Virtual Machine from a Template 564

Using OVF Templates 566

Deploying a VM from an OVF Template 567

Exporting a VM as an OVF Template 569

Examining OVF Templates 571

Using Content Libraries 573

Content Library Data and Storage 573

Content Library Synchronization 574

Creating and Publishing a Content Library 574

Subscribing to a Content Library 575

Operating Content Libraries 577

Working with vApps 579

Creating a vApp 580

Editing a vApp 581

Changing a vApp’s Power State 586

Cloning a vApp 586

Importing Machines from Other Environments 587

The Bottom Line 588

Chapter 11 • Managing Resource Allocation .591

Reviewing Virtual Machine Resource Allocation 591

Working with Virtual Machine Memory 594

Understanding ESXi Advanced Memory Technologies 595

Controlling Memory Allocation 599

Managing Virtual Machine CPU Utilization 608

Default CPU Allocation 609

Setting CPU Affinity 610

Using CPU Reservations 611

Using CPU Limits 612

Using CPU Shares 613

Summarizing How Reservations, Limits, and Shares Work with CPUs 615

Using Resource Pools 615

Configuring Resource Pools 616

Understanding Resource Allocation with Resource Pools 619

Regulating Network I/O Utilization 625

Controlling Storage I/O Utilization 630

Enabling Storage I/O Control 632

Configuring Storage Resource Settings for a Virtual Machine 635

Using Flash Storage 639

The Bottom Line 643

Chapter 12 • Balancing Resource Utilization 645

Comparing Utilization with Allocation 645

Exploring vMotion 646

Examining vMotion Requirements 650

Performing a vMotion Migration Within a Cluster 653

Ensuring vMotion Compatibility 656

Using Per-Virtual-Machine CPU Masking 656

Using Enhanced vMotion Compatibility 658

Using Storage vMotion 662

Combining vMotion with Storage vMotion 665

Cross-vCenter vMotion 668

Examining Cross-vCenter vMotion Requirements 669

Performing a Cross-vCenter Motion 670

Exploring vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler 671

Understanding Manual Automation Behavior 672

Reviewing Partially Automated Behavior 672

Examining Fully Automated Behavior 673

Working with Distributed Resource Scheduler Rules 674

Working with Storage DRS 682

Creating and Working with Datastore Clusters 683

Configuring Storage DRS 686

The Bottom Line 694

Chapter 13 • Monitoring VMware vSphere Performance 697

Overview of Performance Monitoring 697

Using Alarms 698

Understanding Alarm Scopes 700

Creating Alarms 700

Managing Alarms 706

Working with Performance Charts 708

Overview Layout 708

Advanced Layout 710

Working with esxtop 719

Monitoring CPU Usage 721

Monitoring Memory Usage 725

Monitoring Network Usage 727

Monitoring Disk Usage 729

The Bottom Line 732

Chapter 14 • Automating VMware vSphere 735

Why Use Automation? 735

vSphere Automation Options 736

Automating with PowerCLI 737

PowerShell and PowerCLI 737

What’s New in PowerCLI 10 741

Installing and Configuring PowerCLI on Windows 741

Installing and Configuring PowerCLI on macOS 745

Installing and Configuring PowerCLI on Linux 747

Additional PowerCLI Capabilities 749

Getting Started with PowerCLI 750

Building PowerCLI Scripts 755

PowerCLI Advanced Capabilities 767

Additional Resources 771

The Bottom Line 772

Appendix A • The Bottom Line 775

Chapter 1: Introducing VMware vSphere 6.7 775

Chapter 2: Planning and Installing VMware ESXi 776

Chapter 3: Installing and Configuring vCenter Server 777

Chapter 4: vSphere Update Manager and the vCenter Support Tools 780

Chapter 5: Creating and Configuring a vSphere Network 781

Chapter 6: Creating and Configuring Storage Devices 783

Chapter 7: Ensuring High Availability and Business Continuity 787

Chapter 8: Securing VMware vSphere 788

Chapter 9: Creating and Managing Virtual Machines 790

Chapter 10: Using Templates and vApps 792

Chapter 11: Managing Resource Allocation 794

Chapter 12: Balancing Resource Utilization 796

Chapter 13: Monitoring VMware vSphere Performance 798

Chapter 14: Automating VMware vSphere 799

Index 801

When Mastering VMware vSphere 6.0 was released in 2015, Nick Marshall stopped by my office

for a chat We discussed the vSphere 6.0 release, of course, but we also discovered we had a number of things in common Obviously, we have a love for virtualization, some would be aware

of our strong Christian faiths, but maybe more obscurely, we discovered that we have both written books for (Wiley) Sybex During this meeting, Nick also asked me if I would write the foreword for the next Mastering VMware vSphere book As you can see, he’s been planning this one for a while!

Fast forward to 2018, and it brings us to a very exciting year in virtualization VMware

released vSphere 6.7, and Nick has now released the long-awaited Mastering VMware vSphere 6.7

to accompany it This is Nick’s third revision of the best-selling vSphere book after being handed the mantle from Scott Lowe Stepping back a little, there are some anniversaries to celebrate this year too This is the 10-year mark from when Chris McCain released the very first Mastering

VMware book, Mastering VMware Infrastructure 3 Also, VMware celebrates its 20th year since

being founded by Diane Greene, Mendel Rosenblum, Scott Devine, Edward Wang, and Edouard Bugnion

Looking back at these milestones gives us an opportunity to also consider where tion sits in today’s IT environment We’ve come a long way since IBM enabled multitasking by partitioning their mainframes into virtual machines The days of traditional client/server workloads are definitely diminishing, and we are well and truly in the cloud era, a multi-cloud world Even though we are moving into a new era, virtualization is still the foundation of both public and private clouds And of course, the best, most advanced virtualization platform is still VMware vSphere

virtualiza-With VMware vSphere 6.7, we have taken the world’s best hypervisor, ESXi, and added improvements in scale, performance, and even more stability VMware has enabled even more seamless cross-cloud mobility with features like Per-VM EVC, and we’ve doubled down on security with features like TPM, vTPM, and FIPS compliance

In this book, you’ll find all the features and functionality available to you in vSphere, not just the things that have changed in 6.7 Nick and his coauthors have made sure that both new and old features are covered so that you can understand everything there is to know

Well done on another release of this bit of VMware history, Nick I know the readers will appreciate your continued dedication to their understanding of vSphere and the value it can bring them

—Pat Gelsinger, VMware CEO

Virtualization—especially server virtualization—is readily embraced in datacenters wide VMware has gone from being a relatively small vendor to having the commanding share

world-of the server virtualization market Over the years, other companies such as Microsworld-oft, Red Hat, and Citrix have jumped into the server virtualization space, but after all this time, it’s still VMware that’s synonymous with virtualization For all intents and purposes, VMware invented the market

Cloud Computing is a somewhat natural evolution of virtualization If virtualization is the abstraction of individual server hardware, cloud computing is the abstraction of entire datacent-ers’ worth of hardware The scale can be smaller or larger, but the abstraction type is the same But I’m getting ahead of myself If you’re reading this, there’s a chance you’re just now starting

to learn about virtualization What is virtualization, and why is it important to you?

As I mentioned, I define virtualization as the abstraction of one computing resource from

another computing resource Consider storage virtualization—in this case, you are abstracting servers (one computing resource) from the storage to which they are connected (another comput-ing resource) This holds true for other forms of virtualization, too, like application virtualization (abstracting applications from the operating system) When most IT professionals think of virtualization, they think of hardware (or server) virtualization: abstracting the operating system from the underlying hardware on which it runs and thus enabling multiple operating systems to run simultaneously on the same physical server That is the technology on which VMware has built its market share

Almost single-handedly, VMware’s enterprise-grade virtualization solution has ized how organizations manage their datacenters Before VMware introduced its powerful virtualization solution, organizations bought a new server every time a new application needed

revolution-to be provisioned Over time, datacenters became filled with servers that were all using only a fraction of their overall capacity Even though these servers were underutilized, organizations still had to pay to power them and to dissipate the heat they generated

Now, using VMware’s server virtualization products, organizations can run multiple ing systems and applications on their existing hardware, and new hardware is purchased only when capacity needs dictate No longer must organizations purchase a new physical server whenever a new application needs to be deployed By stacking workloads together using

operat-virtualization, organizations derive greater value from their hardware investments They also reduce operational costs by reducing the number of physical servers and associated hardware in the datacenter, in turn decreasing power usage and cooling needs in the datacenter In some cases, these operational cost savings can be quite significant.

But consolidation is only one benefit of virtualization; companies also realize greater load mobility, increased uptime, streamlined disaster-recovery options, and a bevy of other benefits from adopting virtualization And virtualization, specifically server virtualization, has created the foundation for a new way of approaching the computing model: cloud computing.Cloud computing is built on the tenets of broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, on-demand self-service, and measured service Virtualization, such as that provided by VMware’s products, enables the IT industry to embrace this new operational model of more efficiently providing services to their customers, whether those customers are internal (their employees) or external (partners, end users, or consumers) That ability to efficiently provide services is the reason virtualization is important to you

work-This book provides all the information you, as an IT professional, need to design, deploy, configure, manage, and monitor a dynamic virtualized environment built on VMware’s enter-prise-class server virtualization product: vSphere 6.7

—Nick Marshall, Author

What Is Covered in This Book

This book is written with a start-to-finish approach to installing, configuring, managing, and monitoring a virtual environment using the VMware vSphere 6.7 product suite The book begins

by introducing the vSphere product suite and all of its great features After introducing all of the bells and whistles, the book details an installation of the product and then moves into configura-tion This includes configuring vSphere’s extensive networking and storage functionality We wrap up the configuration discussion with chapters on high availability, redundancy, and resource utilization After completing the installation and configuration, we move into virtual machine creation and management and then into monitoring and troubleshooting You can read this book from cover to cover to gain an understanding of the vSphere product suite in prepara-tion for a new virtual environment, or you can use it as a reference if you are an IT professional who has begun your virtualization and wants to complement your skills with real-world tips, tricks, and best practices as found in each chapter

This book, geared toward the aspiring as well as the practicing virtualization professional, provides information to help implement, manage, maintain, and troubleshoot an enterprise virtualization scenario

Here is a glance at what’s in each chapter and the appendix:

Chapter 1: Introducing VMware vSphere 6.7 We begin with a general overview of all the products that make up the vSphere 6.7 product suite This chapter also covers vSphere licensing and provides some examples of benefits that an organization might see from adopting vSphere as its virtualization solution

Chapter 2: Planning and Installing VMware ESXi This chapter looks at the architecture of the VMware hypervisor, ESXi, along with selecting the physical hardware, choosing your

version of VMware ESXi, planning your installation, and installing VMware ESXi, both manually and in an unattended fashion.

Chapter 3: Installing and Configuring vCenter Server In this chapter, we dive deep into planning your vCenter Server environment vCenter Server is a critical management compo-nent of vSphere, so this chapter discusses the proper design, planning, installation, and configuration for vCenter Server

Chapter 4: vSphere Update Manager and the vCenter Support Tools This chapter describes what is involved in planning, designing, installing, and configuring the vSphere Update Manager along with some of the other vCenter tools You’ll use vCenter Update Manager to keep your vSphere environment patched and up-to-date

Chapter 5: Creating and Configuring a vSphere Network This virtual-networking chapter covers the design, management, and optimization of virtual networks, including features like the vSphere Distributed Switch In this chapter, we also initiate discussions and provide solutions on how to integrate the virtual networking architecture with the physical network architecture while maintaining network security

Chapter 6: Creating and Configuring Storage Devices This in-depth chapter provides an extensive overview of the various storage architectures available for vSphere In this chapter,

we discuss vSAN, Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NAS storage design and optimization techniques

as well as storage features like thin provisioning, multipathing, and round-robin load balancing

Chapter 7: Ensuring High Availability and Business Continuity This exciting chapter covers the hot topics regarding business continuity and disaster recovery We provide details

on building highly available server clusters in virtual machines In addition, this chapter discusses the use of vSphere High Availability (HA) and vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT) as ways

of providing failover for virtual machines running in a vSphere environment We also discuss backup options using vSphere’s Storage APIs

Chapter 8: Securing VMware vSphere Security is an important part of any implementation, and in this chapter, we cover different security management aspects, including managing direct ESXi host access and integrating vSphere with Active Directory This chapter also covers how to manage user access for environments with multiple levels of system adminis-tration and how to employ Windows users and groups in conjunction with the vSphere security model to ease the administrative delegation that comes with enterprise-level deployments

Chapter 9: Creating and Managing Virtual Machines This chapter introduces the practices and procedures involved in provisioning virtual machines through vCenter Server In addition, you’re introduced to timesaving techniques, virtual machine optimization, and best practices that will ensure simplified management as the number of virtual machines grows larger over time

Chapter 10: Using Templates and vApps This chapter introduces the idea of templates, a mechanism for more rapidly deploying standardized virtual-machine images We also discuss the different types of cloning and the concept of a vApp—a specialized container used by vSphere for the distribution of multi-VM applications In addition, we discuss the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard used by VMware and other vendors for distributing virtual machines

Chapter 11: Managing Resource Allocation In this chapter, we provide a comprehensive look at managing resource allocation From individual virtual machines to resource pools and clusters of ESXi hosts, this chapter explores how resources are consumed in vSphere and addresses the mechanisms you can use—reservations, limits, and shares—to manage and modify that resource allocation.

Chapter 12: Balancing Resource Utilization Resource allocation isn’t the same as resource utilization, and this chapter follows up the discussion of resource allocation in Chapter 11 with a look at some of the ways vSphere offers to balance resource utilization In this chapter, you’ll learn about vSphere vMotion, Enhanced vMotion Compatibility, vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), Storage vMotion, and Storage DRS

Chapter 13: Monitoring VMware vSphere Performance In this chapter, we look at some of the native tools in vSphere that give virtual infrastructure administrators the ability to track and troubleshoot performance issues The chapter focuses on monitoring CPU, memory, disk, and network adapter performance across ESXi hosts, resource pools, and clusters in vCenter Server In this chapter, you’ll also learn about vCenter Operations Manager

Chapter 14: Getting Started with vSphere Automation Many tasks that VMware vSphere administrators face are repetitive, but automation can help In this chapter, we close out the book by discussing several different ways to bring automation to your vSphere environment, including PowerCLI and the vSphere APIs

Appendix: The Bottom Line This appendix offers solutions to the Master It problems at the end of each chapter

The Mastering Series

The Mastering series from Sybex provides outstanding instruction for readers with intermediate

and advanced skills, in the form of top-notch training and development for those already working in their field and clear, serious education for those aspiring to become pros Every

Mastering book includes the following:

◆ Real-World Scenarios, ranging from case studies to interviews, that show how the tool, technique, or knowledge presented is applied in actual practice

◆ Skill-based instruction, with chapters organized around real tasks rather than abstract concepts or subjects

◆ Self-review test questions, so you can be certain you’re equipped to do the job right

The Hardware Behind the Book

Starting out, it can seem difficult to build an environment in which you can learn by ing the exercises and practices detailed in this book It is possible to build a practice lab with minimal hardware, and we encourage you to follow along with the book If you’re just starting,

implement-we recommend that you build a nested virtual lab on your laptop or desktop computer A nested lab runs the hypervisor itself, ESXi, as a virtual machine It needs VMware Workstation or Fusion installed and at least 16 GB of RAM Be sure to read Chapters 2 and 3 before you attempt to construct any type of environment for development purposes

For the purpose of writing this book, we used multiple hardware configurations When travelling, it was simple to spin up a simple nested lab on our laptops, but more often than not,

we used a decent setup with a small number of servers and storage

It’s not impossible to set yourself up with a nice lab to follow along But for some, this is not the sort of environment to which they have access For entry-level NFS and iSCSI testing, a number of vendors, including DellEMC, HP, and NetApp, offer virtual storage appliances or simulators that you can use to gain some familiarity with shared storage concepts and the vendor’s specific products We encourage you to use these sorts of tools where applicable in your learning process vSAN can also run in evaluation mode if you wish to use local disks

In addition, the VMware Hands-on Labs (HOL) provide fully functioning environments, using nested virtualization at scale You can find details on the HOL website: labs.hol

vmware.com They’re free to use, and you don’t have to follow the guides associated with the labs if you don’t want to

Who Should Buy This Book

This book is for IT professionals looking to strengthen their knowledge of constructing and managing a virtual infrastructure on vSphere 6.7 While the book can also be helpful for those new to IT, a strong set of assumptions is made about the target reader:

◆ A basic understanding of networking architecture

◆ Experience working in a Microsoft Windows environment

◆ Experience managing DNS and DHCP

◆ A basic understanding of how virtualization differs from traditional physical infrastructures

◆ A basic understanding of hardware and software components in standard x86 and x64 computing

How to Contact the Authors

We welcome feedback from you about this book or about books you’d like to see from us in the future

You can reach Nick by writing to nick@nickmarshall.com.au, by following him

on Twitter (his username is @nickmarshall9), or by visiting his blog at www

.nickmarshall.com.au

You can reach out to Mike by following him on Twitter (his username is @vcdx71) or by

visiting his personal blog at www.vcdx71.com

You can reach out to Blair by following him on Twitter (his username is @TheVMBlair), or by

visiting his blog at www.vmblair.com

You can reach Ryan by writing to ryan@tenthirtyam.org, by following @tenthirtyam

on Twitter, or by visiting tenthirtyam.org for his occasional hypertext fragments

VMware vSphere 6.7 builds on previous generations of VMware’s enterprise-grade virtualization products that have been leading the industry since 2001 vSphere 6.7 gives greater control, performance, and extensibility with a focus on enabling workload security and mobility With dynamic resource controls, high availability, and fault-tolerance features along with distributed resource management and operational tools included as part of the suite, IT administrators have all the tools they need to run an enterprise environment ranging from a few servers to tens of thousands of servers distributed among multiple clouds.

IN THIS CHAPTER, YOU WILL LEARN TO

◆ Identify the role of each product in the vSphere product suite

◆ Recognize the interaction and dependencies between the products in the vSphere suite

◆ Understand how vSphere differs from other virtualization products

Exploring VMware vSphere 6.7

VMware vSphere is a comprehensive collection of products and features that together provide a full array of enterprise virtualization functionality The vSphere product suite includes the following products and main features:

◆ VMware ESXi

◆ VMware vCenter Server

◆ vSphere Update Manager (VUM)

◆ vSphere Virtual Symmetric Multi-Processing

◆ vSphere vMotion and Storage vMotion

◆ vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)

◆ vSphere Storage DRS (SDRS)

◆ Storage I/O Control (SIOC) and Network I/O Control (NIOC)

◆ Storage-Based Policy Management (SBPM)

◆ vSphere High Availability (HA)

Introducing VMware vSphere 6.7 Chapter 1

◆ vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT)

◆ vSphere Storage APIs

◆ VMware Virtual SAN (vSAN)

◆ vSphere Replication

◆ vSphere Content LibraryRather than waiting to introduce these products and features in their own chapters, we will introduce each product or feature in the following sections This will allow us to explain how each one affects the design, installation, and configuration of your virtual infrastructure After we cover the features and products in vSphere, you’ll have a better grasp of how each of them fits into the design and the big picture of virtualization

Certain products outside the vSphere product suite extend the vSphere product line with new functionality These additional products include VMware Horizon View, VMware vRealize Automation, and VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager, just to name a few VMware even offers bundles of vSphere and these other products in the vCloud Suite to make it easier for users

to purchase and consume the products in their environments However, because of the size and scope of these products, they are not covered in this book

As of this writing, VMware vSphere 6.7 is the latest release of the VMware vSphere product family This book covers functionality found in version 6.7 Where possible, we’ve tried to note differences between vSphere versions For detailed information on other vSphere versions, refer

to the previous books in the Mastering VMware vSphere series, also published by Sybex.

To help simplify navigation and to help you find information on the breadth of products and features in the vSphere product suite, we’ve prepared Table 1.1, which contains cross-references

to where you can find more information about a particular product or feature elsewhere

in the book

Table 1.1: Product and Feature Cross-References

VMware vSphere product or feature Chapters where this is covered

Networking:—Chapter 5Storage:—Chapter 6VMware vCenter Server Installation:—Chapter 3

Networking:—Chapter 5Storage:—Chapter 6Security:—Chapter 8

vSphere Host Client and vSphere Web Client vSphere Host Client: Chapter 2

vSphere Web Client: Chapter 3VMware vRealize Orchestrator and PowerCLI Chapter 14

First we’ll look at the products that make up the VMware vSphere suite, and then we’ll examine the major features Let’s start with the products in the suite, beginning with VMware ESXi.

Examining the Products in the vSphere Suite

In the following sections, we’ll describe and review the products found in the vSphere product suite

VMware ESXi

The core of the vSphere product suite is the hypervisor, which is the virtualization layer that serves as the foundation for the rest of the product line In vSphere 5 and later, including vSphere 6.7, the hypervisor comes solely in the form of VMware ESXi

Longtime users of VMware vSphere will remember this as a shift in the way VMware provides the hypervisor Prior to vSphere 5, the hypervisor was available in two forms: VMware ESX and VMware ESXi Although both products shared the same core virtualization engine,

VMware vSphere product or feature Chapters where this is covered

vSphere Virtual Symmetric Multi-Processing Chapter 9vSphere vMotion and Storage vMotion Chapter 12vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler Chapter 12

Storage I/O Control and Network I/O Control Chapter 11

vSphere High Availability Chapter 7

vSphere Storage APIs for Data Protection Chapter 7

vSphere Flash Read Cache Installation:—Chapter 6

Usage:—Chapter 11

Table 1.1: Product and Feature Cross-References (continued)

supported the same set of virtualization features, leveraged the same licenses, and were ered bare-metal installation hypervisors (also referred to as Type 1 hypervisors; see the sidebar

consid-“Type 1 and Type 2 Hypervisors”), there were still notable architectural differences In VMware ESX, VMware used a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)-derived Service Console to provide an interactive environment through which users could interact with the hypervisor The Linux-based Service Console also included services found in traditional operating systems, such as a firewall, Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) agents, and a web server

Type 1 and Type 2 Hypervisors

Hypervisors are generally grouped into two classes: Type 1 hypervisors and Type 2 hypervisors

Type 1 hypervisors run directly on the system hardware and thus are often referred to as bare-metal

hypervisors Type 2 hypervisors require a host operating system, and the host operating system provides I/O device support and memory management VMware ESXi is a Type 1 bare-metal hyper-visor (In earlier versions of vSphere, VMware ESX was also considered a Type 1 bare-metal hypervi-sor.) Other Type 1 bare-metal hypervisors include KVM (part of the open source Linux kernel), Microsoft Hyper-V, and products based on the open source Xen hypervisor like Citrix Hypervisor (formally XenServer) and Oracle VM

VMware ESXi, on the other hand, is the next generation of the VMware virtualization foundation Unlike VMware ESX, ESXi installs and runs without the Linux-based Service Console This gives ESXi an ultralight footprint of approximately 150 MB Despite the lack of the Service Console, ESXi provides all the same virtualization features that VMware ESX supported

in earlier versions Of course, ESXi 6.7 has been enhanced from earlier versions to support even more functionality, as you’ll see in this and future chapters

The key reason that VMware ESXi is able to support the same extensive set of virtualization functionality as VMware ESX but without the Service Console is that the core of the virtualiza-

tion functionality wasn’t found in the Service Console It’s the VMkernel that is the foundation of

the virtualization process It’s the VMkernel that manages the virtual machines’ access to the underlying physical hardware by providing CPU scheduling, memory management, and virtual switch data processing The section “VMware ESXi Architecture” in Chapter 2 will go into more detail on how the VMkernel supports and interacts with the rest of the hypervisor Figure 1.1 shows the high level structure of VMware ESXi

We mentioned earlier that VMware ESXi 6.7 is enhanced, and one such area of enhancement is

in the configuration limits of what the hypervisor can support Table 1.2 shows the configuration maximums for the last few versions of VMware ESXi

These are just some of the configuration maximums Where appropriate, future chapters will include additional values for VMware ESXi maximums for network interface cards (NICs), storage, virtual machines (VMs), and so forth

Given that VMware ESXi is the foundation of virtualization within the vSphere product suite, you’ll see content for VMware ESXi throughout the book Table 1.1, earlier in this chapter, tells you where you can find more information about specific features of VMware ESXi

VMware vCenter Server

Stop for a moment to think about your current IT environment Does it include Active Directory? There is a good chance it does Now imagine your environment without Active Directory, without the ease of a centralized management database, without the single sign-on capabilities, and without the simplicity of groups That’s what managing VMware ESXi hosts would be like without using VMware vCenter Server Not a very pleasant thought, is it? Now calm yourself down, take a deep breath, and know that vCenter Server, like Active Directory, is meant to provide a centralized management platform and framework for all ESXi hosts and their respec-tive VMs vCenter Server allows IT administrators to deploy, manage, monitor, automate, and secure a virtual infrastructure in a centralized fashion To help provide scalability, vCenter Server leverages a backend database that stores all the data about the hosts and VMs

Table 1.2: VMware ESXi Maximums

Component

VMware ESXi 6.7

VMware ESXi 6.5

VMware ESXi 6.0

VMware ESXi 5.5

VMware ESXi 5.0

Number of virtual CPUs per host

In previous versions of VMware vSphere, vCenter Server was a Windows-only application Version 6.7 of vSphere still offers this Windows-based installation of vCenter Server, but this will

be the last release available for Windows VMware offers a prebuilt vCenter Server Appliance (a virtual appliance, in fact, something you’ll learn about in Chapter 10, “Using Templates and vApps”) that is based on Photon, a thin and lightweight Linux distribution The Linux-based vCenter Server appliance, or vCSA, is now a more feature-rich version of vCenter since develop-ment of new features has ceased on a Windows version Chapter 3, “Installing and Configuring vCenter Server,” will include more details on what is missing from the Windows version of vCenter Server But for now, unless you already have an existing Windows-based installation, all new installations should use the Linux-based vCenter Server Appliance to ensure a sup-

ported future

vCenter Server not only provides configuration and management capabilities—which include features such as VM templates, VM customization, rapid provisioning and deployment of VMs, role-based access controls, and fine-grained resource allocation controls—it also provides the tools for the more advanced features of vSphere vMotion, vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler, vSphere High Availability, and vSphere Fault Tolerance All of these features are described briefly in this chapter and in more detail in later chapters

In addition to vSphere vMotion, vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler, vSphere High Availability, and vSphere Fault Tolerance, using vCenter Server to manage ESXi hosts enables a number of other features:

◆ Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC), which leverages hardware functionality from Intel and AMD to enable greater CPU compatibility between servers

◆ Host profiles, which allow you to bring greater consistency to host configurations across larger environments and to identify missing or incorrect configurations

◆ Storage I/O Control, which provides cluster-wide quality of service (QoS) controls so you can ensure critical applications receive sufficient storage I/O resources even during times

vCenter Server plays a central role in any sizable VMware vSphere implementation In Chapter 3, we discuss planning and installing vCenter Server as well as look at ways to ensure its availability As previously mentioned, Chapter 3 will examine the differences between the Windows-based version of vCenter Server and the Linux-based vCenter Server virtual appliance Because of vCenter Server’s central role in a VMware vSphere deployment, we’ll touch on vCenter Server in almost every chapter throughout the rest of the book Refer to Table 1.1, earlier

in this chapter, for specific cross-references

vCenter Server is available in three packages:

◆ vCenter Server Essentials is integrated into the vSphere Essentials kits for small office deployment

◆ vCenter Server Foundation provides all the functionality of vCenter Server, but for a limited number of ESXi hosts

◆ vCenter Server Standard provides all the functionality of vCenter Server, including provisioning, management, monitoring, and automation

You can find more information on licensing and product editions for VMware vSphere in the section “Licensing VMware vSphere.”

vSphere Update Manager

vSphere Update Manager is a component of vCenter Server that helps users keep their ESXi hosts and select VMs patched with the latest updates vSphere Update Manager provides the following functionality:

◆ Scans to identify systems that are not compliant with the latest updates

◆ User-defined rules for identifying out-of-date systems

◆ Automated installation of patches for ESXi hosts

◆ Full integration with other vSphere features like Distributed Resource SchedulervSphere Update Manager works as an installable package with the Windows-based installa-tion of vCenter Server as well as the prepackaged feature pre-installed in the vCenter Server virtual appliance Refer to Table 1.1 for more information on where vSphere Update Manager is described in this book

VMware vSphere Client and vSphere Host Client

vCenter Server provides a centralized management framework for VMware ESXi hosts, but it’s the web-based vSphere Client (like its predecessor, the Windows-based vSphere Desktop Client) where you will spend most of your time

With the release of vSphere 5, VMware shifted its primary administrative interface to a web-based vSphere Client built on Adobe Flash The “vSphere Web Client”provided a web-based user interface for managing a virtual infrastructure and enabled you to manage your infrastruc-ture without needing to install the Windows-based vSphere Desktop Client on a system

Unfortunately, the Flash-based client was not well received and ultimately VMware decided to move to the HTML5 web standard This transition took a number of releases, and as a result, multiple clients could be used to do some (but not all) administrative tasks

Initially, the HTML5-based vSphere Web Client (simply known as the “vSphere Client”) offered only a subset of the functionality available to the “Flash” vSphere Web Client However,

in subsequent releases—including the 6.7 release—the vSphere Client has been enhanced and expanded to include most of the functionality you need to manage a vSphere environment

Further, VMware has stated that the Flash-based vSphere Web Client and the Windows-based vSphere Desktop Client are now end-of-life Luckily, the step-by-step procedures for the Flash-based vSphere Web Client and the HTML5-based vSphere client are usually identical For this reason, we’ll use Flash-based vSphere Web Client screen shots and step-by-step guidance throughout this book to ensure each instruction can be completed with the same client.

Administering hosts without vCenter has also changed You now access the user interface by browsing to the URL of each ESXi host This loads an HTML5-based user interface (UI) but only for that particular host No client installation is needed

This can be a little confusing if this is your first foray into the VMware landscape, so let us recap The vSphere Web Client, based on Flash, has been deprecated The Windows-installable vSphere Desktop Client (for connecting to vCenter and hosts) has been deprecated To adminis-ter vCenter, and hosts attached to a vCenter Server, use the new HTML5-based vSphere Client or the Flash-based vSphere Web Client To administer ESXi hosts directly, without vCenter, use the HTML5-based vSphere Host Client

Examining the Features in VMware vSphere

In the following sections, we’ll take a closer look at some of the features available in the vSphere product suite We’ll start with Virtual SMP

vSphere Virtual Symmetric Multi-Processing

The vSphere Virtual Symmetric Multi-Processing (vSMP or Virtual SMP) product allows you to

construct VMs with multiple virtual processor cores and/or sockets vSphere Virtual SMP is not

the licensing product that allows ESXi to be installed on servers with multiple processors; it is the

technology that allows the use of multiple processors inside a VM Figure 1.2 identifies the

differences between multiple processors in the ESXi host system and multiple virtual processors

With vSphere Virtual SMP, applications that require and can actually use multiple CPUs can

be run in VMs configured with multiple virtual CPUs This allows organizations to virtualize even more applications without negatively impacting performance or being unable to meet service-level agreements (SLAs)

This functionality also allows users to specify multiple virtual cores per virtual CPU Using this feature, a user could provision a dual “socket” VM with two cores per “socket” for a total of four virtual cores This approach gives users tremendous flexibility in carving up CPU process-ing power among the VMs

vSphere vMotion and vSphere Storage vMotion

If you have read anything about VMware, you have most likely read about the extremely useful

feature called vMotion vSphere vMotion, also known as live migration, is a feature of ESXi and

vCenter Server that allows you to move a running VM from one physical host to another physical host without having to power off the VM This migration between two physical hosts occurs with no downtime and with no loss of network connectivity to the VM The ability to manually move a running VM between physical hosts on an as-needed basis is a powerful feature that has a number of use cases in today’s datacenters

Suppose a physical machine has experienced a nonfatal hardware failure and needs to be repaired You can easily initiate a series of vMotion operations to remove all VMs from an ESXi host that is to undergo scheduled maintenance After the maintenance is complete and the server

is brought back online, you can use vMotion to return the VMs to the original server

Alternately, consider a situation in which you are migrating from one set of physical servers to

a new set of physical servers Assuming that the details have been addressed—and we’ll discuss the details of vMotion in Chapter 12, “Balancing Resource Utilization”—you can use vMotion to move the VMs from the old servers to the newer servers, making quick work of a server migra-tion with no interruption of service

Even in normal day-to-day operations, vMotion can be used when multiple VMs on the same host are in contention for the same resource (which ultimately causes poor performance across all the VMs) With vMotion, you can migrate any VMs facing contention to another ESXi host with greater availability for the resource in demand For example, when two VMs contend with each other for CPU resources, you can eliminate the contention by using vMotion to move one VM to

an ESXi host with more available CPU resources

vMotion moves the execution of a VM, relocating the CPU and memory footprint between physical servers but leaving the storage untouched Storage vMotion builds on the idea and principle of vMotion: you can leave the CPU and memory footprint untouched on a physical server but migrate a VM’s storage while the VM is still running

Deploying vSphere in your environment generally means that lots of shared storage—Fibre Channel or FCoE or iSCSI SAN or NFS—is needed What happens when you need to migrate from an older storage array to newer storage hardware based on vSAN? What kind of downtime would be required? Or what about a situation where you need to rebalance utilization of the array, either from a capacity or performance perspective?

With the ability to move storage for a running VM between datastores, Storage vMotion lets you address all of these situations without downtime This feature ensures that outgrowing datastores or moving to new storage hardware does not force an outage for the affected VMs and provides you with yet another tool to increase your flexibility in responding to changing

business needs

vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler

vMotion is a manual operation, meaning that you must initiate the vMotion operation What if VMware vSphere could perform vMotion operations automatically? That is the basic idea behind vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) If you think that vMotion sounds exciting, your anticipation will only grow after learning about DRS DRS, simply put, leverages vMotion to provide automatic distribution of resource utilization across multiple ESXi hosts that are config-ured in a cluster

Given the prevalence of Microsoft Windows Server in today’s datacenters, the use of the term

cluster often draws IT professionals into thoughts of Microsoft Windows Server Failover Clusters Windows Server clusters are often active-passive or active-active-passive clusters However, ESXi clusters are fundamentally different, operating in an active-active mode to aggregate and combine resources into a shared pool Although the underlying concept of aggregating physical hardware to serve a common goal is the same, the technology, configuration, and feature sets are quite different between VMware ESXi clusters and Windows Server clusters

Aggregate Capacity and Single Host Capacity

Although we say that a DRS cluster is an implicit aggregation of CPU and memory capacity, it’s important to keep in mind that a VM is limited to using the CPU and RAM of a single physical host

at any given time If you have two small ESXi servers with 64 GB of RAM each in a DRS cluster, the cluster will correctly report 128 GB of aggregate RAM available, but any given VM will not be able to use more than approximately 64 GB of RAM at a time

An ESXi cluster is an implicit aggregation of the CPU power and memory of all hosts involved in the cluster After two or more hosts have been assigned to a cluster, they work in unison to provide CPU and memory to the VMs assigned to the cluster (keeping in mind that any given VM can only use resources from one host; see the sidebar “Aggregate Capacity and Single Host Capacity”) The goal of DRS is twofold:

◆ At startup, DRS attempts to place each VM on the host that is best suited to run that VM at that time

◆ Once a VM is running, DRS seeks to provide that VM with the required hardware resources while minimizing the amount of contention for those resources in an effort to maintain balanced utilization levels

The first part of DRS is often referred to as intelligent placement DRS can automate the

placement of each VM as it is powered on within a cluster, placing it on the host in the cluster that it deems to be best suited to run that VM at that moment

DRS isn’t limited to operating only at VM startup, though DRS also manages the VM’s location while it is running For example, let’s say three hosts have been configured in an ESXi cluster with DRS enabled When one of those hosts begins to experience a high contention for CPU utilization, DRS detects that the cluster is imbalanced in its resource usage and uses an internal algorithm to determine which VM(s) should be moved in order to create the least imbalanced cluster For every VM, DRS will simulate a migration to each host and the results will

be compared The migrations that create the least imbalanced cluster will be recommended or automatically performed, depending on the DRS configuration.

DRS performs these on-the-fly migrations without any downtime or loss of network tivity to the VMs by leveraging vMotion, the live migration functionality we described earlier

connec-This makes DRS extremely powerful because it allows clusters of ESXi hosts to dynamically rebalance their resource utilization based on the changing demands of the VMs running on that cluster

Fewer Bigger Servers or More Smaller Servers?

Recall from Table 1.2 that VMware ESXi supports servers with up to 768 logical CPU cores and up to

16 TB of RAM With vSphere DRS, though, you can combine multiple smaller servers for the pose of managing aggregate capacity This means that bigger, more powerful servers might not be better servers for virtualization projects These larger servers, in general, are significantly more expensive than smaller servers, and using a greater number of smaller servers (often referred to as

pur-“scaling out”) may provide greater flexibility than a smaller number of larger servers (often referred

to as “scaling up”) The key thing to remember is that a bigger server isn’t necessarily a better server

vSphere Storage DRS

vSphere Storage DRS takes the idea of vSphere DRS and applies it to storage Just as vSphere DRS helps to balance CPU and memory utilization across a cluster of ESXi hosts, Storage DRS helps balance storage capacity and storage performance across a cluster of datastores using mechanisms that echo those used by vSphere DRS

Earlier, we described vSphere DRS’s feature called intelligent placement, which automates the placement of new VMs based on resource usage within an ESXi cluster In the same fashion, Storage DRS has an intelligent placement function that automates the placement of VM virtual disks based on storage utilization Storage DRS does this through the use of datastore clusters

When you create a new VM, you simply point it to a datastore cluster, and Storage DRS matically places the VM’s virtual disks on an appropriate datastore within that datastore cluster

auto-Likewise, just as vSphere DRS uses vMotion to balance resource utilization dynamically, Storage DRS uses Storage vMotion to rebalance storage utilization based on capacity and/or latency thresholds Because Storage vMotion operations are typically much more resource-inten-sive than vMotion operations, vSphere provides extensive controls over the thresholds, timing, and other guidelines that will trigger a Storage DRS automatic migration via Storage vMotion

Storage I/O Control and Network I/O Control

VMware vSphere has always had extensive controls for modifying or controlling the allocation of CPU and memory resources to VMs Before the release of vSphere 4.1, however, vSphere could not apply extensive controls to storage I/O and network I/O Storage I/O Control and Network I/O Control address that shortcoming

Storage I/O Control (SIOC) allows you to assign relative priority to storage I/O as well as assign storage I/O limits to VMs These settings are enforced cluster-wide; when an ESXi host detects storage congestion through an increase of latency beyond a user-configured threshold, it will apply the settings configured for that VM The result is that you can help the VMs that need

priority access to storage resources get more of the resources they need In vSphere 4.1, Storage I/O Control applied only to VMFS storage; vSphere 5 extended that functionality to NFS datastores.

The same goes for Network I/O Control (NIOC), which provides you with more granular controls over how VMs use network bandwidth provided by the physical NICs As the wide-spread adoption of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10GbE) and faster continues, Network I/O Control provides you with a way to more reliably ensure that network bandwidth is properly allocated to VMs based on priority and limits

Policy-Based Storage

With profile-driven storage, vSphere administrators can use storage capabilities and VM storage profiles to ensure VMs reside on storage that provides the necessary levels of capacity, perfor-mance, availability, and redundancy Profile-driven storage is built on two key components:

◆ Storage capabilities, leveraging vSphere APIs for storage awareness (VASA)

◆ VM storage profilesStorage capabilities are either provided by the storage array itself (if the array can use VASA and/or defined by a vSphere administrator These storage capabilities represent various attrib-utes of the storage solution

VM storage profiles define the storage requirements for a VM and its virtual disks You create

VM storage profiles by selecting the storage capabilities that must be present for the VM to run Datastores that have all the capabilities defined in the VM storage profile are compliant with the

VM storage profile and represent possible locations where the VM could be stored

This functionality gives you much greater visibility into storage capabilities and helps ensure that the appropriate functionality for each VM is indeed being provided by the underlying storage These storage capabilities can be explored extensively by using VVOLs or vSAN

Refer to Table 1.1 to find out which chapter discusses profile-driven storage in more detail

vSphere High Availability

In many cases, high availability—or the lack of high availability—is the key argument used against virtualization The most common form of this argument more or less sounds like this:

“Before virtualization, the failure of a physical server affected only one application or workload After virtualization, the failure of a physical server will affect many more applications or workloads running on that server at the same time We can’t put all our eggs in one basket!”VMware addresses this concern with another feature present in ESXi clusters called vSphere High Availability (HA) Once again, by nature of the naming conventions (clusters, high avail-ability), many traditional Windows administrators will have preconceived notions about this feature Those notions, however, are incorrect in that vSphere HA does not function like a high-availability configuration in Windows The vSphere HA feature provides an automated process for moving and restarting VMs that were running on an ESXi host at a time of server failure (or other qualifying infrastructure failure, as we’ll describe in Chapter 7, “Ensuring High Availability and Business Continuity”) Figure 1.3 depicts the VM migration that occurs when an ESXi host that is part of an HA-enabled cluster experiences failure

The vSphere HA feature, unlike DRS, does not always use the vMotion technology as a means

of migrating servers to another host vMotion applies only to planned migrations, where both the source and destination ESXi host are running and functioning Let us explain what we mean In a vSphere HA failover situation, there is no anticipation of failure; it is not a planned outage, which means there is no time to perform a vMotion operation vSphere HA is intended to minimize unplanned downtime because of the failure of a physical ESXi host or other infrastructure components We’ll go into more detail in Chapter 7 on what kinds of failures vSphere HA helps protect against

vSphere HA Improvements from vSphere 5

vSphere HA received a few notable improvements over the last few releases Scalability was cantly improved, and it was closely integrated with the intelligent placement functionality of vSphere DRS, giving vSphere HA greater ability to restart VMs in the event of a host failure

signifi-However, perhaps the most significant improvement is the complete rewrite of the underlying architecture for vSphere HA; this newer architecture, known as Fault Domain Manager (FDM), elim-inated many of the constraints found in earlier versions of VMware vSphere (before version 5.0)

By default, vSphere HA does not provide failover in the event of a guest OS failure, although you can configure vSphere HA to monitor VMs and restart them automatically if they fail to respond to an internal heartbeat This feature is called VM Failure Monitoring, and it uses a combination of internal heartbeats and I/O activity to attempt to detect if the guest OS inside a

VM has stopped functioning If the guest OS has stopped functioning, the VM can be restarted automatically

ESXi hostESXi host

VM Restart

Figure 1.3

The vSphere HA feature

will restart any VMs

that were previously

running on an ESXi

host that experiences

server or storage

path failure

With vSphere HA in a failure scenario, it’s important to understand that there will be an interruption of service If a physical host or storage device fails, vSphere HA restarts the VM, and while the VM is restarting, the applications or services provided by that VM are unavailable The only time that this is not true is if Proactive HA is enabled on the host Proactive HA uses hardware monitoring to proactively move VMs from a host that is suffering from hard-ware issues.

For users who need even higher levels of availability than can be provided using vSphere HA, vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT), which is described in the next section, can help

vSphere Fault Tolerance

Although vSphere HA provides a certain level of availability for VMs in the event of physical host failure, this might not be good enough for some workloads vSphere FT might help in these situations

As we described in the previous section, vSphere HA protects against unplanned physical server failure by providing a way to automatically restart VMs upon physical host failure This need to restart a VM in the event of a physical host failure means that some downtime—gener-ally less than three minutes—is incurred vSphere FT goes even further and eliminates any downtime in the event of a physical host failure vSphere FT maintains a mirrored secondary VM

on a separate physical host that is kept in lockstep with the primary VM vSphere’s newer Fast Checkpointing technology supports FT of VMs with one to four vCPUs Everything that occurs

on the primary (protected) VM also occurs simultaneously on the secondary (mirrored) VM, so that if the physical host for the primary VM fails, the secondary VM can immediately step in and take over without any loss of connectivity vSphere FT will also automatically re-create the secondary (mirrored) VM on another host if the physical host for the secondary VM fails, as illustrated in Figure 1.4 This ensures protection for the primary VM at all times

In the event of multiple host failures—say, the hosts running both the primary and secondary VMs failed—vSphere HA will reboot the primary VM on another available server, and vSphere

FT will automatically create a new secondary VM Again, this ensures protection for the primary

VM at all times

vSphere FT can work in conjunction with vMotion As of vSphere 5.0, vSphere FT is also integrated with vSphere DRS, although this feature does require Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) VMware recommends that multiple FT virtual machines with multiple vCPUs have 10GbE networks between hosts

vSphere Storage APIs for Data Protection and VMware Data Protection

One of the most critical aspects of any IT infrastructure, not just virtualized infrastructure, is a solid backup strategy as defined by a company’s disaster recovery and business continuity plan

To help address organizational backup needs, VMware vSphere has a key component: the vSphere Storage APIs for Data Protection (VADP)

VADP is a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that back up vendors leverage in order to provide enhanced backup functionality of virtualized environments VADP enables functionality like file-level backup and restore; support for incremental, differential, and full-image backups; native integration with backup software; and support for multiple storage protocols

On its own, though, VADP is just a set of interfaces, like a framework for making backups possible You can’t actually back up VMs with VADP You’ll need a VADP-enabled backup application There are a growing number of third-party backup applications that are designed to work with VADP from vendors such as CommVault, DellEMC, and Veritas

vSphere Data Protection

In vSphere 5.1, VMware phased out its earlier data protection tool, VMware Data Recovery (VDR),

in favor of vSphere Data Protection (VDP) Although VDR was provided with vSphere 5.0, VDR is not supported with vSphere 5.1 and later Subsequently, VMware has also discontinued VDP from vSphere 6.5 Backups of your vSphere environment now need to be handled by another vendor

Virtual SAN (vSAN)

vSAN was a major new feature included with, but licensed separately from, vSphere 5.5 and later It is the evolution of work that VMware has been doing for a number of years now vSAN lets organizations leverage the internal local storage found in individual compute nodes and turn

it into a virtual SAN.

vSAN requires a minimum of two ESXi hosts (or nodes) for some limited configurations, but

it will scale to as many as 64 vSAN also requires solid-state (flash) storage in each of the pute nodes providing vSAN storage; this is done to help improve I/O performance given that most compute nodes have a limited number of physical drives present vSAN pools the aggre-gate storage across the compute nodes, allowing you to create a datastore that spans multiple compute nodes vSAN employs policies and algorithms to ensure performance or to help protect

com-against data loss, such as ensuring that the data exists on multiple participating vSAN nodes at the same time.

There’s more information on vSAN in Chapter 6, “Creating and Configuring Storage Devices.”

vSphere Replication

vSphere Replication brings data replication, which is a feature typically found in hardware storage platforms, into vSphere itself It’s been around since vSphere 5.0, when it was only enabled for use in conjunction with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 5.0 In vSphere 5.1, vSphere Replication was decoupled from SRM and enabled for independent use without VMware SRM

vSphere Replication enables customers to replicate VMs from one vSphere environment to another vSphere environment Typically, this means from one data center (often referred to as the primary or production data center) to another datacenter (typically the secondary, backup, or disaster recovery [DR] site) Unlike hardware-based solutions, vSphere Replication operates on a per-VM basis, so it gives customers very granular control over which workloads will be repli-cated and which workloads won’t be replicated

You can find more information about vSphere Replication in Chapter 7

vSphere Flash Read Cache

Since the release of vSphere 5.0 in 2011, the industry has seen tremendous uptake in the use of solid-state or “flash” storage across a wide variety of use cases Because solid-state storage can provide massive numbers of I/O operations per second (IOPS) and very large bandwidth (Mbps)

it can handle the increasing I/O demands of virtual workloads However, depending on the performance, solid-state storage is still typically more expensive on a per-gigabyte basis than traditional, magnetic-disk-based storage and therefore is often first deployed as a caching mechanism to help speed up frequently accessed data

Unfortunately, without support in vSphere for managing solid-state storage as a caching mechanism, vSphere architects and administrators have had difficulty fully leveraging solid-state storage in their environments In vSphere 5.5 and later, VMware addresses that limitation

through a feature called vSphere Flash Read Cache.

vSphere Flash Read Cache brings full support for using solid-state storage as a caching mechanism to vSphere Using this feature, you can assign solid-state caching space to VMs in much the same way as you assign CPU cores, RAM, or network connectivity to VMs vSphere manages how the solid-state caching capacity is allocated and assigned as well as how it is used

by the VMs

VMware vSphere Compared to Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix Hypervisor

It’s not possible to compare some virtualization solutions to others, because they are fundamentally different in approach and purpose Such is the case with VMware ESXi and some of the other virtu-alization solutions on the market

To make accurate comparisons between vSphere and others, you must include only Type 1 metal”) virtualization solutions This would include ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, and Citrix Hypervisor

(“bare-It would not include products such as VMware Fusion or Workstation and Windows Virtual PC, all

of which are Type 2 (“hosted”) virtualization products Even within the Type 1 hypervisors, there are architectural differences that make direct comparisons difficult

For example, both Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix Hypervisor route all the VM I/O through the ent partition” or “dom0.” This typically provides greater hardware compatibility with a wider range

“par-of products In the case “par-of Hyper-V, for example, as soon as Windows Server—the general-purpose operating system running in the parent partition—supports a particular type of hardware, Hyper-V supports it also Hyper-V “piggybacks” on Windows’ hardware drivers and the I/O stack The same can be said for Citrix Hypervisor, although its “dom0” runs Linux and not Windows

VMware ESXi, on the other hand, handles I/O within the hypervisor itself This typically provides greater throughput and lower overhead at the expense of slightly more limited hardware compatibil-ity To add more hardware support or updated drivers, the hypervisor must be updated because the I/O stack and device drivers are in the hypervisor

This architectural difference is fundamental, and nowhere is it more greatly demonstrated than in ESXi, which has a small footprint yet provides a full-featured virtualization solution Both Citrix Hypervisor and Microsoft Hyper-V require a full installation of a general-purpose operating system (Windows Server for Hyper-V, Linux for Citrix Hypervisor) in the parent partition/dom0 in order

to operate

In the end, each of the virtualization products has its own set of advantages and disadvantages, and large organizations may end up using multiple products For example, VMware vSphere might be best suited in a large corporate datacenter, whereas Microsoft Hyper-V or Citrix Hypervisor might

be acceptable for test, development, or branch office deployment Organizations that don’t require VMware vSphere’s advanced features like vSphere DRS, vSphere FT, or Storage vMotion may also find that Microsoft Hyper-V or Citrix Hypervisor is a better fit for their needs

As you can see, VMware vSphere offers some pretty powerful features that will change the way you view the resources in your datacenter vSphere also has a wide range of features and functionality Some of these features, though, might not be applicable to all organizations, which

is why VMware has crafted a flexible licensing scheme for organizations of all sizes

Licensing VMware vSphere

With each new version, VMware usually revises the licensing tiers and bundles intended to provide a good fit for every market segment Introduced with vSphere 5.1 (and continuing on through vSphere 6.7), VMware refined this licensing arrangement with the vCloud Suite—a bundling of products including vSphere, vRealize Automation, vCenter Site Recovery Manager, and vRealize Operations Management Suite

Although licensing vSphere via the vCloud Suite is likely the preferred way of licensing vSphere moving forward, discussing all the other products included in the vCloud Suite is beyond the scope of this book Instead, we’ll focus on vSphere and explain how the various features discussed so far fit into vSphere’s licensing model when vSphere is licensed stand-alone

One thing that you need to be aware of is that VMware may change the licensing tiers and capabilities associated with each tier at any time You should visit the vSphere products web page (www.vmware.com/products/vsphere.html) or talk to your VMware representative before making any purchasing decisions