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to deploy ESXi: install it interactively, perform an unattended installation, or use vSphere Auto Deploy to provision ESXi as it boots up.

      Master It Your manager asks you to provide him with a copy of the unattended installation script that you will be using when you roll out ESXi using vSphere Auto Deploy. Is this something you can give him?

      Master It Name two advantages and two disadvantages of using vSphere Auto Deploy to provision ESXi hosts.

      Perform postinstallation configuration of ESXi. Following the installation of ESXi, some additional configuration steps may be required. For example, if the wrong NIC is assigned to the management network, the server won’t be accessible across the network. You’ll also need to configure time synchronization.

      Master It You’ve installed ESXi on your server, but the welcome web page is inaccessible, and the server doesn’t respond to a ping. What could be the problem?

      Install the vSphere Desktop Client. ESXi is managed using the vSphere Desktop Client, an application that provides the functionality to manage the virtualization platform.

      Master It List two ways by which you can install the vSphere Desktop Client.

      Chapter 3

      Installing and Configuring vCenter Server

      In the majority of today’s information systems, the client-server architecture is king. This standing is because the client-server architecture can centralize resource management and give end users and client systems simplified access to those resources. Information systems used to exist in a flat, peer-to-peer model, when user accounts were required on every system where resource access was needed and when significant administrative overhead was needed simply to make things work. That’s how managing a large infrastructure with many ESXi hosts feels without vCenter Server. vCenter Server brings the advantages of the client-server architecture to the ESXi host and to VM management.

      In this chapter, you will learn to

      • Understand the components and role of vCenter Server

      • Plan a vCenter Server deployment

      • Install and configure a vCenter Server database

      • Install and configure the Platform Services Controller

      • Install and configure vCenter Server

      • Install and configure the Web Client service

      • Use vCenter Server’s management features

      Introducing vCenter Server

      As the size of a virtual infrastructure grows, managing the infrastructure from a central location becomes significantly more important. vCenter Server is an application that serves as a centralized management tool for ESXi hosts and their respective VMs. vCenter Server acts as a proxy that performs tasks on the individual ESXi hosts that have been added as members of a vCenter Server installation. As discussed in Chapter 1, “Introducing VMware vSphere 6,” VMware includes vCenter Server licensing in every kit and every edition of vSphere, underscoring the importance of vCenter Server. Although VMware does offer a few different editions of vCenter Server (vCenter Server Essentials, vCenter Server Foundation, and vCenter Server Standard), I’ll focus only on vCenter Server Standard in this book.

      VMware has a number of other products, but vCenter is generally the central integration point tying them all together. Software such as vRealize Automation, Site Recovery Manager, and vRealize Operations Manager all depend on an instance of vCenter Server to integrate into the VMware environment. Not only this, but as you will see, much of the advanced functionality that vSphere offers comes only when vCenter Server is present. Specifically, vCenter Server offers core services in the following areas:

      • Resource management for ESXi hosts and VMs

      • Template management

      • VM deployment

      • VM management

      • Scheduled tasks

      • Statistics and logging

      • Alarms and event management

      • ESXi host management

Figure 3.1 outlines the core services available through vCenter Server.

Figure 3.1 vCenter Server provides a full spectrum of virtualization management functions.

      vCenter Server can be installed in two ways. The traditional approach is an application installed on a Windows server; the other format is as a Linux-based virtual appliance. You’ll learn more about virtual appliances in Chapter 10, “Using Templates and vApps,” but for now, suffice it to say that the vCenter Server virtual appliance (which you may see referred to as VCVA or VCSA) offers an option to quickly and easily deploy a full installation of vCenter Server and Platform Services on SUSE Linux.

      Because of the breadth of features included in vCenter Server, most of these core services are discussed in later chapters. For example, Chapter 9, “Creating and Managing Virtual Machines,” discusses VM deployment, VM management, and template management. Chapter 11, “Managing Resource Allocation,” and Chapter 12, “Balancing Resource Utilization,” deal with resource management for ESXi hosts and VMs. Chapter 13, “Monitoring VMware vSphere Performance,” discusses alarms. In this chapter, I’ll focus primarily on ESXi host management, but we’ll also discuss scheduled tasks, statistics and logging, and event management.

      There are other key items about vCenter Server that you can’t really consider core services. Instead, these underlying features support core services. To help you more fully understand the value of vCenter Server in a vSphere deployment, let’s take a closer look at the following:

      • Centralized user authentication

      • Web Client server

      • Extensible framework

      Centralizing User Authentication Using vCenter Single Sign-On

      Centralized user authentication is not listed as a core service of vCenter Server, but it is essential to how vCenter and many other VMware products operate. In Chapter 2, “Planning and Installing VMware ESXi,” we discussed a user’s authentication to an ESXi host under the context of a user account created and stored locally on that host. Generally speaking, without vCenter Server you would need a separate user account on each ESXi host for each administrator who needed access to the server. As the number of ESXi hosts and required administrators grows, the number of accounts to manage grows exponentially. There are workarounds for this overhead; one such workaround is integrating your ESXi hosts into Active Directory, a topic we’ll discuss in more detail in Chapter 8, “Securing VMware vSphere.” In this chapter, we’ll assume the use of local accounts, but be aware that using Active Directory integration with your ESXi hosts does change the picture somewhat. In general, though, the centralized user authentication vCenter Server offers is easier to manage than other available methods.

      In a virtualized infrastructure with only one or two ESXi hosts, administrative effort is not a major concern. Administering one or two servers would not incur incredible effort on the part of the administrator, and creating user accounts for administrators would not be too much of a burden.

      In situations like this, you may not miss vCenter Server from a management perspective, but you may certainly miss its feature set. In addition to its management capabilities, vCenter Server can perform vMotion, configure vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), establish vSphere High Availability (HA), and use vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT). These features are not accessible using ESXi hosts without vCenter Server. You also lose key functionality such as vSphere Distributed Switches, host profiles, policy-driven storage, and vSphere Update Manager. vCenter Server is a requirement for any enterprise-level virtualization project.

      vcenter Server Requirement

      Strictly speaking, vCenter Server

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