Introduction

Back in 2005 I was trying to convince my boss that we should use GSX Server on our shiny new DL385. To him, it was a hard sell. He didn't understand why on earth we should install two operating systems onto a server, “It'll just slow it down!” he exclaimed. So I went ahead and started experimenting with VMware software on my desktop computer. Luckily at the time I had a workstation capable of running such things.

The times have changed quite a bit since then, and now virtualization—especially server virtualization—is readily embraced in corporate datacenters worldwide. VMware has gone from a relatively small vendor to one of the corporate heavyweights, garnering a commanding share of the server virtualization market with its top-notch virtualization products. Even now, when other companies such as Microsoft and Citrix have jumped into the server virtualization space, it's still VMware that's almost synonymous with virtualization. For all intents and purposes, VMware invented the market.

If you're reading this, though, there's a chance you're just now starting to learn about virtualization. What is virtualization, and why is it important to you?

I define virtualization as the abstraction of one computing resource from another computing resource. Consider storage virtualization; in this case, you are abstracting servers (one computing resource) from the storage to which they are connected (another computing resource). This holds true for other forms of virtualization, too, like application virtualization (abstracting applications from the operating system). When most information technology professionals think of virtualization, they think of hardware (or server) virtualization: abstracting the operating system from the underlying hardware on which it runs and thus enabling multiple operating systems to run simultaneously on the same physical server. That is the technology on which VMware has built its market share.

Almost single-handedly, VMware's enterprise-grade virtualization solution has revolutionized how organizations manage their datacenters. Before VMware introduced its powerful virtualization solution, organizations bought a new server every time a new application needed to be provisioned. Over time, datacenters became filled with servers that were all using only a fraction of their overall capacity. Even though these servers were underutilized, organizations still had to pay to power them and to dissipate the heat they generated.

Now, using VMware's server virtualization products, organizations can run multiple operating systems and applications on their existing hardware, and new hardware is purchased only when capacity needs dictate. No longer must organizations purchase a new physical server whenever a new application needs to be deployed. By stacking workloads together using virtualization, organizations derive greater value from their hardware investments. They also reduce operational costs by reducing the number of physical servers and associated hardware in the datacenter, in turn decreasing power usage and cooling needs in the datacenter. In some cases these operational cost savings can be quite significant.

But consolidation is only one benefit of virtualization; companies also realize greater workload mobility, increased uptime, streamlined disaster-recovery options, and a bevy of other benefits from adopting virtualization. And virtualization, specifically server virtualization, has created the foundation for a new way of approaching the computing model: cloud computing.

Cloud computing is built on the tenets of broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, on-demand self-service, and measured service. Virtualization, such as that provided by VMware's products, enables the IT industry to embrace this new operational model of more efficiently providing services to their customers, whether those customers are internal (their employees) or external (partners, end users, or consumers). That ability to efficiently provide services is the reason virtualization is important to you.

This book provides all the information you, as an information technology professional, need to design, deploy, configure, manage, and monitor a dynamic virtualized environment built on VMware's enterprise-class server virtualization product, vSphere 5.5.

What Is Covered in This Book

This book is written with a start-to-finish approach to installing, configuring, managing, and monitoring a virtual environment using the VMware vSphere 5.5 product suite. The book begins by introducing the vSphere product suite and all of its great features. After introducing all of the bells and whistles, the book details an installation of the product and then moves into configuration. This includes configuring vSphere's extensive networking and storage functionality. We wrap up the configuration discussion with chapters on high availability, redundancy, and resource utilization. After completing the installation and configuration, we move into virtual machine creation and management and then into monitoring and troubleshooting. You can read this book from cover to cover to gain an understanding of the vSphere product suite in preparation for a new virtual environment, or you can use it as a reference if you are an IT professional who has begun your virtualization and wants to complement your skills with real-world tips, tricks, and best practices as found in each chapter.

This book, geared toward the aspiring as well as the practicing virtualization professional, provides information to help implement, manage, maintain, and troubleshoot an enterprise virtualization scenario.

Here is a glance at what's in each chapter:

• Chapter 1: Introducing VMware vSphere 5.5 We begin with a general overview of all the products that make up the vSphere 5.5 product suite. This chapter also covers vSphere licensing and provides some examples of benefits that an organization might see from adopting vSphere as its virtualization solution.
• Chapter 2: Planning and Installing VMware ESXi This chapter looks at selecting the physical hardware, choosing your version of VMware ESXi, planning your installation, and actually installing VMware ESXi, both manually and in an unattended fashion.
• Chapter 3: Installing and Configuring vCenter Server In this chapter, we dive deep into planning your vCenter Server environment. vCenter Server is a critical management component of vSphere, and so this chapter discusses the proper design, planning, installation, and configuration for vCenter Server.
• Chapter 4: vSphere Update Manager and the vCenter Support Tools This chapter describes what is involved in planning, designing, installing and configuring the vSphere Update Manager. You'll use vCenter Update Manager to keep your vSphere environment patched and up-to-date.
• Chapter 5: Creating and Configuring Virtual Networks The virtual networking chapter covers the design, management, and optimization of virtual networks, including new features like the vSphere Distributed Switch and other third-party switches. In this chapter we also initiate discussions and provide solutions on how to integrate the virtual networking architecture with the physical network architecture while maintaining network security.
• Chapter 6: Creating and Configuring Storage Devices This in-depth chapter provides an extensive overview of the various storage architectures available for vSphere. In this chapter we discuss Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NAS storage design and optimization techniques as well as storage features like thin provisioning, multipathing, and round-robin load balancing.
• Chapter 7: Ensuring High Availability and Business Continuity This exciting chapter covers the hot topics regarding business continuity and disaster recovery. We provide details on building highly available server clusters in virtual machines. In addition, this chapter discusses the use of vSphere High Availability (HA) and vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT) as ways of providing failover for virtual machines running in a vSphere environment. We also discuss backup options using vSphere's Storage APIs.
• Chapter 8: Securing VMware vSphere Security is an important part of any implementation, and in this chapter we cover different security management aspects, including managing direct ESXi host access and integrating vSphere with Active Directory. This chapter also covers how to manage user access for environments with multiple levels of system administration and how to employ Windows users and groups in conjunction with the vSphere security model to ease the administrative delegation that comes with enterprise-level deployments.
• Chapter 9: Creating and Managing Virtual Machines This chapter introduces the practices and procedures involved in provisioning virtual machines through vCenter Server. In addition, you're introduced to timesaving techniques, virtual machine optimization, and best practices that will ensure simplified management as the number of virtual machines grows larger over time.
• Chapter 10: Using Templates and vApps Chapter 10 introduces the idea of templates, a mechanism for more rapidly deploying standardized VM images. We also discuss cloning and the concept of a vApp—a specialized container used by vSphere for the distribution of multi-VM environments. In addition, we discuss the OVF standard used by VMware and other vendors for distributing VMs.
• Chapter 11: Managing Resource Allocation In this chapter we provide a comprehensive look at managing resource allocation. From individual virtual machines to resource pools and clusters of ESXi hosts, this chapter explores how resources are consumed in vSphere and addresses the mechanisms you can use—reservations, limits, and shares—to manage and modify that resource allocation.
• Chapter 12: Balancing Resource Utilization Resource allocation isn't the same as resource utilization, and this chapter follows up the discussion of resource allocation in Chapter 11 with a look at some of the ways vSphere offers to balance resource utilization. In this chapter, you'll learn about vSphere vMotion, Enhanced vMotion Compatibility, vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), Storage vMotion, and Storage DRS.
• Chapter 13: Monitoring VMware vSphere Performance In Chapter 13 we look at some of the native tools in vSphere that give virtual infrastructure administrators the ability to track and troubleshoot performance issues. The chapter focuses on monitoring CPU, memory, disk, and network adapter performance across ESXi hosts, resource pools, and clusters in vCenter Server. In this chapter you'll also learn about vCenter Operations Manager.
• Chapter 14: Automating VMware vSphere Many tasks VMware vSphere administrators face are repetitive, and here automation can help. In Chapter 14 we discuss several different ways to bring automation to your vSphere environment, including vCenter Orchestrator and PowerCLI.
• Appendix: The Bottom Line This appendix offers solutions to the Master It problems at the end of each chapter.

The Mastering Series

The Mastering series from Sybex provides outstanding instruction for readers with intermediate and advanced skills, in the form of top-notch training and development for those already working in their field and clear, serious education for those aspiring to become pros. Every Mastering book includes the following:

• Real-World Scenarios, ranging from case studies to interviews, that show how the tool, technique, or knowledge presented is applied in actual practice
• Skill-based instruction, with chapters organized around real tasks rather than abstract concepts or subjects
• Self-review test questions, so you can be certain you're equipped to do the job right

The Hardware behind the Book

Starting out, it can seem difficult to build an environment in which you can learn by implementing the exercises and practices detailed in this book. It is possible to build a practice lab with minimal hardware, and we encourage you to follow along with the book. If you're just starting, we recommend building a nested virtual lab on your laptop or desktop computer. Head to www.labguides.com for details on AutoLab, a nested vSphere automation tool. It only needs VMware Workstation or Fusion installed and 8 GB of RAM. Be sure to read Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 before you attempt to construct any type of environment for development purposes.

For the purpose of writing this book, we used the following hardware configuration:

• Three Hewlett Packard DL-385 servers
• Two Hewlett Packard N36L micro servers
• One Qnap 439 Pro II NAS
• One generic 24-port gigabit switch

As you can see, it's not impossible to set yourself up with a nice lab to follow along. But for some, this is not the sort of environment to which they have access. For entry-level NFS and iSCSI testing, a number of vendors, including EMC, HP, and NetApp, offer virtual storage appliances or simulators that you can use to gain some familiarity with shared storage concepts and that specific vendor's products. We encourage you to use these sorts of tools where applicable in your learning process.

Who Should Buy This Book

This book is for IT professionals looking to strengthen their knowledge of constructing and managing a virtual infrastructure on vSphere 5.5. While the book can also be helpful for those new to IT, a strong set of assumptions is made about the target reader:

• A basic understanding of networking architecture
• Experience working in a Microsoft Windows environment
• Experience managing DNS and DHCP
• A basic understanding of how virtualization differs from traditional physical infrastructures
• A basic understanding of hardware and software components in standard x86 and x64 computing

How to Contact the Authors

We welcome feedback from you about this book or about books you'd like to see from us in the future.

You can reach Nick by writing to [email protected], by following him on Twitter (his username is @nickmarshall9), or by visiting his blog at www.nickmarshall.com.au.

You can reach Scott by writing to [email protected], by following him on Twitter (his username is @scott_lowe), or by visiting his blog at http://blog.scottlowe.org.