As per my last post, we already knew how to :

1. Install & Configure vSphere
2. Configure Host Profile

Now, I will show you another interesting feature you can get in vSphere which is called “Network Distributed Switch” a.k.a vDS. Little introduction about vDS here :

“The VMware® vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS) is a new type of virtual switch introduced with VMware vSphere™ 4. The vDS simplifies virtual machine networking by enabling you to manage virtual machine networking for a number of hosts in a datacenter as a single virtual switch from a centralized VMware vCenter™ Server through a vSphere client interface.”

Before that, all steps shown below based on my new setup. There will be some steps which are not suitable for existing environment with few running VMs. Please refer the documentation provided by VMware on how to vDS migration if you have some doubt bout it. Read more

As per my previous post last time here I already showed about how to install and configure vCenter for vSphere. Now, we will proceed with another vSphere features called “Host Profile”.

Host profiles simplify host configuration management through user-defined configuration policies across the entire datacenter. Host profile policies can capture the blueprint of a known, validated golden configuration and use this to configure networking, storage settings, security settings, and so on for multiple hosts. Read more

This howto was intended to be a guide on how to do basic installation of vSphere completely for dummies. All screenshots as per given here was taken during my personal test with below setup :-

1. 1x ESX 4.0 (Eval)
2. 1x ESXi (Eval)
3. vCenter running on VMs
4. Resolve hostname using /etc/hosts file

I will not discuss on how to install the ESX here since it’s quite easy for newbies actually. So, first we need to create a VMs with minimum setup as below :-

• 1x vCPU
• 2gb memory
• 15gb each for C:\ and E:\ drive

Read more

I’m quite buzy with my first vSphere project lately which still in the solution design stage. During this period I’m spending my time to understand more on vSphere features, planning and strategy which I gonna use for this project. Since my customer bought vSphere Enterprise Plus license, there will be a new things need to be configured which are different from my previous implementation. Is it hard or is it so much different between ESX 3.5 and ESX 4.0? To me, nothing much different on clustering features such as VMware HA, DRS and vMotion between those versions though there will be some interesting features come with vSphere such VMSafe,VMShield, host profile, network distributed switch, data recovery, fault tolerence and etc. But then, new question came into my mind such as :-

1. Does the hardware provided by partner supported for vSphere features?
2. If supported, do vSphere features suit with my customer environment?
3. If it’s suit for my customer, do I need to implement all as per my scope of work?

After all questions has been answered clearly and sadly to say that, my first vSphere project will only involve VMware HA, DRS & vMotion even though customer entitle for Enterprise Plus features. what a waste….

ariyossss

athlon_crazy 10/09/2009 11:51pm