Category: VMware Administration
VMware Snapshots in vSphere How To
VMware vSphere virtual machines provide powerful capabilities that allow today’s workloads to have a very agile, versatile, and efficient environment for software. One of the tantalizingly cool features of VMware virtual machines since they came on the scene has been the ability to take snapshots and revert back to those snapshots if need be. Snapshots […]
Posted on August 7, 2017 by Brandon Lee
Back Up a vCenter Server Appliance: How-To
One of the downsides with earlier versions of the vCenter server appliance or VCSA was the lack of a native backup mechanism within the appliance to perform backups of your vCenter data. With VMware vSphere vCenter 6.5 and the new VCSA 6.5 appliance, we have the new native backup ability within the appliance VAMI interface […]
Posted on July 31, 2017 by Brandon Lee
VMware Backup Best Practices
Backups are a critical part of our VMware virtual infrastructure. These days with mission-critical 24 hour a day, 7 days a week, the always-on infrastructure behind many web-facing businesses, business continuity is essential. When thinking about backing up our VMware virtual environments, what are some best practices to make sure we are getting effective, efficient, […]
Posted on May 24, 2017 by Brandon Lee
Basic PowerCLI Scripting for VMware vSphere
Previously, we looked at PowerCLI – what it is, how to install it, and integrating into Windows Powershell ISE. Now, let’s take a look at basic scripting including connecting, PowerCLI commandlets, as well as looping. Basic PowerCLI scripting Let’s take a look at a few basic PowerCLI commandlets to see how easy it is to […]
Posted on April 17, 2017 by Brandon Lee
Introduction to VMware vSphere Automation with PowerCLI
PowerCLI is one of the most powerful means to automate the installation, VM provisioning, changes, and really any aspect of VMware vSphere. Anytime we can automate tasks that are performed frequently or at a certain interval, we are using our time as administrators much more efficiently. Let’s take a look at what PowerCLI is as […]
Posted on April 10, 2017 by Brandon Lee
How to Configure a vSAN Cluster
In the previous post, we’ve compared shared storage approaches. Now we’ll take a closer look at how to configure vSAN. Host Requirements At least three hosts contributing local disks. Each host must contribute one SSD and at least one HDD ESXi 5.5 or later on each host. You can add hosts to the Virtual SAN […]
Posted on March 20, 2017 by Dmitriy Yegarmin
Comparing Shared Storage Approaches for VMware vCenter Cluster
The common technique for increasing redundancy, high availability, and load efficiency for a vSphere environment is to arrange ESXi hosts into vCenter cluster. One of the most important requirements for clusters is creating a shared storage. There are several ways to do this: SAS interfaces on storage servers and an ESXi host Fibre Channel iSCSI […]
Posted on March 13, 2017 by Dmitriy Yegarmin
VMware vSphere Roles and Permissions
The assigning of VMware vSphere permissions in vCenter is tied to the role a user is paired to. A role is a predefined set of privileges. There are default roles that are already created within vCenter that can be taken advantage of. However, if we want to create a customized predefined set of privileges, we […]
Posted on March 6, 2017 by Brandon Lee
VMware vSphere: Active Directory Integration
In the previous post, we looked at Single Sign On (SSO) and its importance in the vSphere architecture. Also, we looked at the fact that SSO can utilize Microsoft’s Active Directory as an identity source for authentication. Let’s look at the advantages of integrating with Active Directory and how this is configured. To integrate the […]
Posted on February 27, 2017 by Brandon Lee
VMware vSphere: vCenter Single Sign-On (SSO)
One of the key pieces to administering a vSphere infrastructure is being able to assign administrative permissions on vSphere resources. Managing logins and permissions in a VMware vSphere vCenter Server environment is critical to not only allowing granular permissions on resources but also providing an audit trail of actions that are being performed within the […]
Posted on February 15, 2017 by Brandon Lee