With vSphere 6.0 Vmware has enhanced so many features and host profile is one of them. Let’s refresh what host profile do. A plain simple definition of host profile is:

“Host Profiles allow you to configure standard configurations for your ESXi hosts and to automate compliance to these configurations, simplifying operational management of large-scale environments and reducing errors caused by misconfigurations”

Two main features that are enhanced in vSphere v6.0 are:

Maintenance Mode Removal

Till release of vSphere 5.5 host profile required hosts to be put in maintenance mode before you can apply the profile. This can be a very inconvenient task when you are trying to change some configuration during normal business hours specially when the Host:VM consolidation ratio is high.

With vSphere 6.0 Vmware has made host profiles a bit intelligent. Now a host profile will require a host to be put into maintenance mode only if the configuration settings defined in host profile requires it.… Read More

Today I was reading one of the Duncan Epping’s blog and found one useful info related to HA so thought of sharing with you all.

We all are aware of DRS affinity and anti-affinity rules and we know the fact that HA doesn’t respect the VM-Host should rules and if any host fails then HA can restart the VM’s anywhere and not necessarily on the host to which VM’s has affinity rules tied up.

However on next invocation of DRS (default 5 minutes) this violation would be corrected by DRS itself and VM’s will return to the host according to the VM-Host affinity rules.

With vSphere 6.0 VMware has introduced one new advanced configurable option in HA. This setting is called “das.respectVmHostSoftAffinityRules”.

As the name itself suggests, this setting will let HA to respect VM-Host affinity rules when it can and can violate it when HA doesn’t have much choice.… Read More

Today I was looking for some tricks to tweak vCenter server 5.5 for my home lab as I have only 8 GB RAM available and my lab was damn slow. Below is my lab configuration

vCenter Server v5.5 (with embedded MS SQL Server) – Installed on Server 2008 R2 SP1 OS (Physical)

2 Esxi Server v5.5 – 2.5 GB RAM each (Virtual)

Domain Controller + DNS (server 2003) – 512 MB RAM (Virtual)

Openfiler – 768 MB RAM (Virtual)

After powering on all the VM’s which are running inside vmware workstation (installed on my server 2008) my LAB has become too slow and memory utilization was shooting upto 7.8 GB.

It was nearly impossible to work anything from GUI (VI Client + Web Client) as my Esxi hosts were getting disconnected from VC time and again whenever I was doing any configuration (addition or modification) due to the SQL timeout and I was relying on just command line.… Read More

What is Content Library?

One of the new feature of vSphere 6 is Content Library . The Content Library provides simple and effective management for VM templates, vApps, ISO images and scripts for vSphere Administrators collectively called “content”.

Sometimes we have ISO and other files (needed for VM creation etc) are spread across datastores as multiple administrators are managing vSphere Infrastructure.This can lead to duplication of the contents. To mitigate this issue concept of content library is introduced in vSphere 6.o which allows for a centralized place for storing your contents.

Advantage of Content Library

The Content Library can be synchronized across sites and vCenter Servers. Sharing consistent templates and files across multiple vCenter Servers in same or different locations brings out consistency, compliance, efficiency and automation in deploying workloads at scale.

Following are some of the features of the content library:

• Store and manage content – Once central location to manage all content as VM templates, vApps, ISO’s, scripts etc.

… Read More

Every year vExperts are chosen all round the world for their contribution towards the VMware community and for their efforts VMware offers the vExperts access to community (private forum, access to beta products etc.)

Besides the public recognition of being a vExpert, they get additional benefits like free subscriptions, NFR licenses and so on from 3rd party vendors. However the information given below is available on the vExpert Community Page but still I am sharing this so that if anyone has missed it, they can checkout the benefits for year 2015 from here.

Vendor vExpert freebies

Vendor (Software/Goodie)	Category?	Link
Pluralsight (Free subscription for one year)	Learning	Free training for MVPs and vExperts
Login VSI	Software license	VIP Program – Login VSI
Starwind	Software license	Free NFR License V8
Veeam	Software license	FREE NFR LICENCE FOR Veeam Management Suite for VMware and Hyper-V
Datacore	Software license	http://pages.datacore.com/Free_NFR_Software.html
Solarwinds	Software license	Virtualization Manager NFR
Symantec	Software license	Free Backup Exec 2014 V-Ray Edition with Support
Royal TS/X	Software license	Royal TS/X NFR License
Proximal Data	Software license	vExperts Give Us a Try
Devolutions Remote Desktop Manager	Software license	Send an email to mtrottier@devolutions.net

… Read More

In our last posts of this series we learnt :

Taking DB and SSL Certficates Backup

Upgrading vCenter SSO

Upgrading vCenter Inventory Service

Upgrading vCenter Server

Now its time to upgrade the web client. Before starting the upgrade process lets discuss the basics about vSphere Web Client

The vSphere Web Client allows you to connect to a vCenter server to manage your vSphere environment through a web browser. Web Client make its entry with version 5.0 but with limited functionality. With further release of vSphere versions Web Client was optimized a lot and now a days VMware is pushing hard to use vSphere web client instead of windows based VI client.

All the new features of vSphere 5.5 can only be performed using vSphere web client and it will not be available in the traditional windows client. In the future release of vSphere version VMware can totally take out the regular C# VI Client and the only choice left will be using Web Client to manage the Virtual Infrastructure.… Read More

In our last few posts we have walkthrough the process of

Taking DB and SSL Certficates Backup

Upgrading vCenter SSO

Upgrading vCenter Inventory Service

Now its time to upgrade the vCenter Server. So lets start

Steps:

1: Launch the autorun.exe file from the installation directory and select vCenter Server and hit Install.

2: Select the installer language and hit OK.

3: Installer will detect previous version of vCenter Server already installed and warn you that it will be upgraded to version 5.5. Ignore the warning and hit Next.

4: Accept the License Agreement and hit Next.

5: You can provide the installation key during upgrade or else after Upgradation is complete.

6: If you did not supplied any key it will warn you that license key for previous version is no longer valid. Ignore the warning and click Next.

7: If you have chosed to use Windows Authentication during DSN setup it will take the credentials of currently login user and you can hit Next or else you have to specify DB username and password for your vCenter DB.… Read More

In our last post we learnt

Taking DB and SSL Certficates Backup

Upgrading vCenter SSO

In this post we will focus on upgrading vCenter Inventory Service.

Before start upgrading the Inventory Service lets discuss some basics about what actually is the Inventory Service.

Inventory Service reduces direct client requests to the vCenter server with query caching, reducing the load on core vCenter Server processes. Generally only 10% of traffic to a vCenter Server consists of writes and most of the requests (90%) are read requests. So if we can cache those reads so that we don’t have to ask vCenter to retrieve from its database each time, we can see a significant improvement in response times; while also reducing the load on the more critical vCenter Server itself.

Inventory service stores vCenter server application and inventory data which enable us to search and access objects across linked vCenter Server systems. The main use case of the Inventory Service is to manage the vSphere Web Client inventory objects and property queries that the client requests when users navigate the vSphere environment.… Read More