Skip to main content

vSphere Deployment: Deploying the vCenter Server Appliance 6.5

vSphere Deployment is a 6 part series that will walk you through deploying and configuring the components of vSphere 6.5.

Part 1: vSphere Deployment: Deploying ESXi 6.5 to a Host
Part 2: vSphere Deployment: Deploying the vCenter Server Appliance 6.5
Part 3: vSphere Deployment: Configuring an HA Cluster in vCenter 6.5
Part 4: vSphere Deployment: Configuring Traditional Storage in vCenter 6.5
Part 5: vSphere Deployment: Configuring a Datastore Cluster in vCenter 6.5
Part 6: vSphere Deployment: Configuring vSphere Update Manager (VUM) in vCenter 6.5

For those unfamiliar, VMware vCenter is a management suite for your VMware vSphere environment. It allows you to manage your VMware infrastructure from a single pane of glass. With vCenter 6.5 you can choose one of two ways to deploy the software:

  • Install the vCenter software on a Windows server (physical or virtual)
  • Deploy the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA)

Though VMware still allows you to deploy vCenter on a Windows server, we’re not going to cover that here. Not only is that installation fairly straight-forward being that it’s a Windows application, but 6.5 is the last version of vCenter that VMware will make available for Windows. Going forward you will have to deploy vCenter as a …

Read More

Simplifying Veeam Backups Using VMware Tags

If you’re lazy like me, you hate having to open 26 different applications when you provision a new virtual machine. Lets eliminate the need to open one of those applications, Veeam.

Traditionally, when you provision a new virtual machine, you would open Veeam Backup & Replication Console and add that specific VM to one of the Backup Jobs you have configured. You’d have to make sure that you’ve correctly configured things like encryption, application-aware backups, exceptions and credentials for the VM you’ve provisioned.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I hate extra work. Here’s how you can solve this problem with a little bit of automation using VMware Tags and Veeam Backup & Replication.

Note: VMware Tags require vCenter version 5.1 and above. Reference

Step 1: Create Backup Tags in VMware vCenter
For my needs, I created quite a few VMware Tags. One for each of the Veeam Backup Jobs I needed, and a few to dynamically change the settings of the backup job for specific virtual machines. Here’s how they’re laid out:

  1. Create a new category for your backup tags called Backup. For this category, you should set Cardinality to Many tags per object, and you

Read More

VMware vSphere 6.5 Upgrade eBook

Emad Younis is a Staff Technical Marketing Architect working in the Cloud Platform Business Unit, part of the R&D organization at VMware. His current focuses are the vCenter Server Appliance, vCenter Server Migrations, and VMware Cloud on AWS. He’s written tons of blogs, whitepapers and eBooks for VMware, including the eBook that this blog is about. For those of us who are migrating from older vSphere versions (like 5.5,  which is end of support in September) to vSphere 6.5, this eBook is a must have resource.

This free eBook was written to help guide VMware customers through every phase of the vSphere 6.5 upgrade process. It’s broken down into three phases:

Phase 1: Pre-upgrade – The work that you need to do before starting an upgrade.
Phase 2: Upgrade – Outlining the steps of the upgrade process and execution.
Phase 3: Post-Upgrade – Validating with business owners that everything went according to plan.

Each phase outlines minute details things that you should consider during the upgrade process, and also links to resources that will help make your upgrade a successful one. Included in the eBook are two common upgrade scenarios to help guide you through the upgrade process from …

Read More

VMware Tagging and Why You Should Care

VMware Tags were introduced with vSphere 5.1, and replace the legacy Custom Attributes feature from earlier versions. Tags allow you to add valuable metadata to every object in your inventory, which makes them searchable and sortable by those tags. How can this be used, you ask? Well I’ll tell you how I use tags.

I use tags to control which backup a virtual machine is a part of, to control the settings that should be applied during the backup, to identify the priority of virtual machines for business continuity and disaster recovery purposes, to define the patch group the virtual machine is in, to identify server roles and installed applications, to create dynamic groups of machines in Turbonomic Operations Manager. One of the guys on my team even built a dynamic list of servers on our SharePoint site that allows us to see at a glance every server in our environment and filter it to find the information we need quickly.

What is a Category?
Categories allow you to group related tags together. When you define a category, you can also specify which object types its tags can be applied to and whether more than one tag in the category …

Read More