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

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6: If you did not supplied any key it will warn you that license key for previous version is no longer valid.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

Yesterday I decided to upgrade my home lab from vSphere 5.1 version to vSphere 5.5 as part of my VCAP preparation (as VCAP 510 exam is no longer valid) and I decided to write a post on that so that it can be helpful for others as well.

The upgrade process is not much complex but you have to take certain considerations in mind before starting the upgrade process. With vSphere 5.5 VMware has done many changes and your environment should have that kind hardware/software which can support version 5.5.

We will be covering the upgrade process in following 5 steps

Taking DB and SSL Certficates Backup

Upgrading vCenter SSO

Upgrading vCenter Inventory Service

Upgrading vCenter Server

Upgrading vSphere Web Client

Before starting the upgrade lets look at the important considerations

1: Upgrade Considerations

There are 2 upgrades methods available:

Simple Install upgrade
The Simple Install upgrade will upgrade all the vCenter components (SSO + Inventory Service + vCenter Server + Web Client) on a single machine like a simple install will install all components on a single machine.… Read More

Introduction

In a physical environment all the servers have dedicated physical NIC that are connected to a physical switch. VLANs in physical world are usually controlled by setting the VLAN ID on the physical switch port and then setting the server’s IP address to correspond to that NIC’s VLAN.

But in a virtual environment, dedicating a physical NIC (pNIC) to each VM that resides on the host is not possible. In reality, a physical NIC of the Esxi host service many VMs, and these VM’s may need to be connected to different VLANs. So the method of setting a VLAN ID on the physical switch port doesn’t work.

To counter this issue, 802.1Q VLAN tagging comes in picture in virtual environment.

Before digging deep into 802.1Q VLAN tagging lets understand how networking works in a virtual environment.

An Esxi host typically can have more than one physical network adapters for redundancy, load balancing and segregation.… Read More

In this post I am going to cover a few advance settings in HA which you can be used in deploying complex HA solutions. You may or may not be using these advance value in your environment but sometimes you have to use these values depending upon how your virtualization infrastructure is laid.

1: das.isolationaddress: – By default the IP address used to check host isolation is the default gateway of the VMkernel port on the host. You can add more IP addresses for the host to use during an isolation check. A total of 10 addresses can be used (0-9).

For setting up this value Select Cluster > Edit Settings > vSphere HA > Advanced Options

2: das.usedefaultisolationaddress:– this option has 2 values: True or False. When set to false a host will NOT use the default gateway as an isolation address. This may be useful when the default gateway of your host is an unpingable address, or a virtual machine, such as a virtual firewall

3: das.isolationShutdownTimeout… Read More