Hol 1811 02 SDC - PDF - en

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Table of Contents
Lab Overview - HOL-1811-02-SDC - Getting Started with vSphere with Operations
Manager............................................................................................................................ 3
Lab Guidance .......................................................................................................... 4
Module 1 - vCenter Server Appliance as a First Choice (60 minutes).............................. 11
Introduction........................................................................................................... 12
vCenter Server Appliance Overview...................................................................... 13
vSphere Update Manager Integration ................................................................... 14
vCenter Server Availability.................................................................................... 17
Platform Services Controller Topologies & Platform Services Controller High
Availability............................................................................................................. 20
vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) Backup ............................................................. 25
Hands-on Labs Interactive Simulation: vCenter Server Appliance Restore ........... 35
Migration Assistant................................................................................................ 36
Conclusion............................................................................................................. 40
Module 2 - Next Generation Management Clients (45 Minutes)...................................... 42
Introduction........................................................................................................... 43
VMware Host Client Overview ............................................................................... 44
vSphere HTML5 Client and Web Client Enhancements.......................................... 50
Conclusion............................................................................................................. 61
Module 3 - Getting Familiar with vRealize Operations (30 Minutes) ................................ 63
Overview of vRealize Operations Management..................................................... 64
Understanding the User Interface - vRealize Operations Manager........................ 66
Exploring vRealize Operations Manager................................................................ 84
Module 4 - Introduction to vRealize Log Insight (30 Minutes) ......................................... 96
Overview of vRealize Log Insight .......................................................................... 97
Exploring vSphere Log Events............................................................................. 102
Module 5 - Administration Basics (60 Minutes) ............................................................. 116
Introduction......................................................................................................... 117
Cluster Management........................................................................................... 118
Create and Edit a Virtual Machine ....................................................................... 119
Migrate a Virtual Machine ................................................................................... 143
Working with Virtual Machine Snapshots ............................................................ 150
Cloning Virtual Machines and Using Templates ................................................... 162
Abstraction of Storage for More Efficient Management and Better Control......... 177
Managing Your Storage ....................................................................................... 188
Build and Manage your Virtual Infrastructure - Scale Out ................................... 198
Conclusion........................................................................................................... 200
Module 6 - Upgrading vCenter (30 Minutes) ................................................................. 202
Introduction......................................................................................................... 203
Upgrading vCenter .............................................................................................. 204
Conclusion........................................................................................................... 208
Module 7 - vCenter Server Appliance Migration (30 Minutes) ....................................... 210
HOL-1811-02-SDC Page 1
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Introduction......................................................................................................... 211
Hands-on Labs Interactive Simulation: vCenter Server Appliance Migration....... 212
Conclusion........................................................................................................... 215
Module 8 - High Availability and Business Continuity (60 Minutes) ............................... 217
Introduction......................................................................................................... 218
vCenter Server High Availability Overview.......................................................... 219
vCenter Server Appliance: Platform Services Controller High Availability (PSC
HA) ...................................................................................................................... 222
Demonstrate resilience to network component failures...................................... 227
vSphere Replication ............................................................................................ 240
Conclusion........................................................................................................... 241
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Lab Overview -
HOL-1811-02-SDC -
Getting Started with
vSphere with Operations
Manager
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Lab Guidance
Note: It will take more than 90 minutes to complete this lab. You should
expect to only finish 2-3 of the modules during your time. The modules are
independent of each other so you can start at the beginning of any module
and proceed from there. You can use the Table of Contents to access any
module of your choosing.
The Table of Contents can be accessed in the upper right-hand corner of the
Lab Manual.
This introductory lab will explore the components and their capabilities within vSphere
6.5. It will cover how to implement these in addition to basic administration topics. This
lab also explores the key features of vSphere 6.5 and how to operationalize them. You
will learn how to deploy and manage upgrades and migrations, enhance availability,
monitor and optimize workload performance, and learn how proactive analysis of logs
can detect problems before they affect your workloads. This is an excellent place to
begin your experience with VMware vSphere.
The lab is broken into 8 Modules which can be taken in any order:
Lab Module List:
• Module 1 - vCenter Server Appliance as a First Choice (60 minutes) (Basic)

This module will cover deployment models, management, and availability of the
vCenter Server Appliance and the Platform Services Controller. In this lab we'll
also discuss the interoperability between the vCenter Server Appliance and
vSphere Update Manager.
• Module 2 - Next Generation Management Clients (45 minutes) (Basic) This
module will cover the next generation of HTML5-based management clients. First
well discuss the VMware Host Client which enables vSphere Administrators to
manage their ESXi hosts through an HTML5 web interface. Then well cover the
enhancements made to the current vSphere Web Client as well as introduce the
next generation of vSphere Client using HTML5.
• Module 3 - Getting Famaliar with vRealize Operations (30 minutes) (Basic)
In this section we will highlight a few of the major interface components, so that
you can easily navigate the Product UI. Focusing on the new simplified UI, less
clicks to data, as well as Data Visualizations using Dashboards and Reports.
• Module 4 - Introduction to vRealize Log Insight (30 minutes) (Basic) In this
module we will introduce you to some of the main features of vRealize Log
Insight, VMware's log management and analysis tool.
• Module 5 - Administration Basics (60 minutes) (Basic) This module will cover
basic administration of a vSphere environment. Topics will include management
of vSphere clusters, virtual machines, ESXi hosts, storage, and networking.
• Module 6 - Upgrading vCenter (30 minutes) (Basic) This module will help you
decide on an upgrade path for moving to the latest version vCenter Server.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
• Module 7 - vCenter Server Appliance Migration (30 minutes) (Basic) This

module will explore migrating from vCenter Server running on Windows to the
vCenter Server Appliance. Migrating to the vCenter Server Appliance decreases
complexity, simplifies management, and removed the need for an external
database for vCenter Server.
• Module 8 - High Availability and Business Continuity (60 minutes) (Basic)
In this module vSphere Administrators will learn how to deploy and configure a
vSphere environment for high availability including vCenter Server, the Platform
Services Controller, and virtual machines. You'll also explore how vSphere is also
resilient during network failures and follow a Business Continuity demonstration
using vSphere Replication and vSphere Data Protection.
Lab Captains:
• Modules 1, 2, and 5-8 - Anoop Jalan, Staff SE, US

• Modules 3 and 4 - Ben Todd, Staff Solution Architect, US
This lab manual can be downloaded from the Hands-on Labs Document site found here:
http://docs.hol.vmware.com
This lab may be available in other languages. To set your language preference and have
a localized manual deployed with your lab, you may utilize this document to help guide
you through the process:
http://docs.hol.vmware.com/announcements/nee-default-language.pdf
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Location of the Main Console
1. The area in the RED box contains the Main Console. The Lab Manual is on the tab
to the Right of the Main Console.
2. A particular lab may have additional consoles found on separate tabs in the upper
left. You will be directed to open another specific console if needed.
3. Your lab starts with 90 minutes on the timer. The lab can not be saved. All your
work must be done during the lab session. But you can click the EXTEND to
increase your time. If you are at a VMware event, you can extend your lab time
twice, for up to 30 minutes. Each click gives you an additional 15 minutes.
Outside of VMware events, you can extend your lab time up to 9 hours and 30
minutes. Each click gives you an additional hour.
Alternate Methods of Keyboard Data Entry
During this module, you will input text into the Main Console. Besides directly typing it
in, there are two very helpful methods of entering data which make it easier to enter
complex data.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Click and Drag Lab Manual Content Into Console Active

Window
You can also click and drag text and Command Line Interface (CLI) commands directly
from the Lab Manual into the active window in the Main Console.
Accessing the Online International Keyboard
You can also use the Online International Keyboard found in the Main Console.
1. Click on the Keyboard Icon found on the Windows Quick Launch Task Bar.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Click once in active console window
In this example, you will use the Online Keyboard to enter the "@" sign used in email
addresses. The "@" sign is Shift-2 on US keyboard layouts.
1. Click once in the active console window.

2. Click on the Shift key.
Click on the @ key
1. Click on the "@ key".
Notice the @ sign entered in the active console window.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Activation Prompt or Watermark
When you first start your lab, you may notice a watermark on the desktop indicating
that Windows is not activated.
One of the major benefits of virtualization is that virtual machines can be moved and
run on any platform. The Hands-on Labs utilizes this benefit and we are able to run the
labs out of multiple datacenters. However, these datacenters may not have identical
processors, which triggers a Microsoft activation check through the Internet.
Rest assured, VMware and the Hands-on Labs are in full compliance with Microsoft
licensing requirements. The lab that you are using is a self-contained pod and does not
have full access to the Internet, which is required for Windows to verify the activation.
Without full access to the Internet, this automated process fails and you see this
watermark.
This cosmetic issue has no effect on your lab.
Look at the lower right portion of the screen
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Please check to see that your lab is finished all the startup routines and is ready for you
to start. If you see anything other than "Ready", please wait a few minutes. If after 5
minutes your lab has not changed to "Ready", please ask for assistance.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Module 1 - vCenter Server

Appliance as a First
Choice (60 minutes)
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Introduction
This Module contains the following lessons:
• Lesson 1: vCenter Server Appliance Overview - This lesson introduces you to the
vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA), the new baseline for vCenter.
• Lesson 2: vSphere Update Manager Integration - As of vSphere 6.5, vSphere
Update Manager has been incorporated into the VCSA. This lesson describes what
else is new with Update Manager.
• Lesson 3: vCenter Server Availability - This module introduce the new vCenter
Server High Availability feature
• Lesson 4: Platform Services Controller Topologies & Platform Services Controller
High Availability - This lesson outlines various Platform Services controller
architectures and describes how to implement the Platform Services Controller.
• Lesson 5: vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) Backup - Here you will perform a
backup of the vCenter Server Appliance using the built in tools.
• Lesson 6: Hands-on Lab Interactive Simulation: vCenter Appliance Restore - This
lesson simulates the restore of a vCenter Server Appliance and its associated
Platform Services Controller from backup.
• Lesson 7: Migration Assistant - This lesson provides an overview of the migration
from vSphere 5.5 or 6.0 to 6.5
HOL-1811-02-SDC
vCenter Server Appliance Overview

With the release of vSphere 6.5, the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) has surpassed the
feature set and performance of the Windows Installable vCenter server. Configuration
maximums have been equal between the two since vSphere 6.0. There are two
components: vCenter and Platform Services Controller. Depending on the size/
deployment model, these can be embedded or external. These concepts and the
architecture will be covered later in this module.
Why VCSA 6.5 Should Be The Default Deployment Choice
For starters, the installer has gotten an overhaul with a new modern look and feel. Users
of both Linux and Mac will also be ecstatic since the installer is now supported on those
platforms along with Microsoft Windows. If that wasn’t enough, the vCenter Server
Appliance now has features that are exclusive such as:
• Migration
• Improved Appliance Management
• Native High Availability
• Built-in Backup / Restore
There are several other general improvements:
• VMware Update Manager is now part of the vCenter Server Appliance

• Performance improvements to the vSphere Web Client and the fully supported
HTML5-based vSphere Client
Security
Although the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) has previously been built on a
customized 'VMware edition' of a SUSE Enterprise Linux appliance, the vCSA 6.5 runs
PhotonOS. PhotonOS is a Linux OS that is purpose-built for virtualization by VMware.
Therefore it comes pre-hardened and does not support the installation of third party
software. The configuration disables unnecessary services, uses special host firewall and
network interfaces, and removes local accounts except for the application's
administration. VMware pre-hardens the vCenter Server Appliance using the applicable
guidelines of the Unix SRG STIG. Customers do not install software within the VCSA
except for updates obtained from VMware. There is no general-purpose interface to the
Linux operating system. Even the SSH interface, reserved for administrators, is disabled
by default.
Module Lessons
The remainder of this module focuses on lessons around these feature enhancements.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
vSphere Update Manager Integration

vSphere Update Manager is now integrated with the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA).
When you deploy the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA), the VMware vSphere
Update Manager Extension service starts automatically. You can no longer
connect a vSphere Update Manager instance that is installed on a Windows Server
machine with the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA). Attempts to connect vSphere
Update Manager during installation on a Windows operating system to a vCenter Server
Appliance (vCSA) fail with an error.
vSphere Update Manager deployed with the vCenter Server Appliance uses a
PostgreSQL database. While vSphere Update Manager and the vCenter Server Appliance
(vCSA) share the same PostgreSQL database instance, they use separate PostgreSQL
databases which run on the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA). In case you need to reset
the vSphere Update Manager database, the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) database
remains intact.
vSphere Update Manager enables centralized, automated patch and version

management for VMware vSphere and offers support for VMware ESXi hosts, virtual
machines, and virtual appliances (Upgrade and patch operations of virtual appliances
will be deprecated in a future release).
With vSphere Update Manager, you can perform the following tasks:
1. Upgrade and Patch ESXi hosts

2. Install and update third-party software on hosts
3. Upgrade virtual machine hardware, VMware Tools, and Virtual Appliances
vSphere Update Manager Web Client
1. vSphere Update Manager Web Client for the vSphere Web Client - View scan
results and compliance states for vSphere Inventory
It is also recommended to complete HOL-1811-03-SDC "vSphere with

Operations Management: Advanced Topics" to gain in-depth knowledge about
administering vSphere Update Manager. Module 5, in that lab, covers this
topic in Lesson 1.
What's new in vSphere Update Manager 6.5
• Update Manager 64-bit application support: The Update Manager server 6.5
and UMDS 6.5 are now supported 64-bit applications.
• Update Manager as a service in the vCenter Server Appliance: The Update
Manager server is fully integrated with the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) and
is enabled by default with the deployment of the vCenter Server Appliance
(vCSA).
HOL-1811-02-SDC
• Support for UMDS installation on Linux: You can install the UMDS on a 64-bit
Linux-based operating system. UMDS 6.5 installer is delivered with the ISO file of
the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA).
• Support for Update Manager Utility installation on Linux: You can install
the Update Manager Utility on a 64-bit Linux-based operating system.
• Support for migration of Update Manager on Windows to vCenter Server
Appliance 6.5: VMware provides supported paths for migrating Update Manager
from a Windows operating system to a vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA).
• Update Manager tab changed position in the vSphere user interface: The
Update Manager tab is now a top-level tab, same as the Monitor tab, the
Configure tab, the Datacenters tab, the Host & Clusters tab, etc.
Update Manager Web Client
The client component of Update Manager is a plug-in to the vSphere Web Client. The
Update Manager client component provides you with the full set of capabilities you need
to perform patch and version management for your vSphere inventory.
The Update Manager plug-in for the vSphere Web Client requires no installation. After
starting the Update Manager service in the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA), the
Update Manager client component is automatically enabled in the vSphere Web Client.
An Update Manager icon appears on the Home screen, and the Update Manager
appears amongst the top-level tabs in the vSphere Web Client.
You can access the Administration view of Update Manager from vSphere Web Client
Home screen. You can access the Compliance view of Update Manager by selecting an
object from the vSphere inventory and navigating to the Update Manager tab.
Update Manager Download Service
vSphere Update Manager Download Service (UMDS) is an optional module of Update

Manager that you can use to download patch definitions on a system that is separate
from the Update Manager server. Use UMDS in case your Update Manager deployment
system is secured and the machine on which the Update Manager server is installed has
no access to the Internet.
You have two options for installation of UMDS. You can install UMDS on a 64-bit Windows
operating systems. You must not install the UMDS on the same Windows machine where
the Update Manager server is installed.  You can also install the UMDS on a Linux-based
system. In vSphere 6.5 release, an installer for UMDS 6.5 is delivered with the ISO file of
the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA). As a prerequisite to install the UMDS on Linux, you
need a Linux server on which you must preconfigure the PostgreSQL database and a
64-bit DSN. Mount the ISO file of the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) to the Linux
machine, and install and configure UMDS 6.5.
To use UMDS, the download service must be of a version that is compatible with the
Update Manager server. For more information about the compatibility between Update
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Manager and the UMDS, see the Installing and Administering VMware vSphere Update
Manager documentation.
Update Manager Utility
The Update Manager Utility allows you to change the database password and proxy
authentication, re-register Update Manager with vCenter Server, and replace the SSL
certificates for Update Manager. For more information about reconfiguring the Update
Manager settings by using the utility, see the Reconfiguring VMware vSphere Update
Manager documentation.
When you install Update Manager or UMDS, vSphere Update Manager Utility is silently
installed on your system as an additional component.
Migration Options
VMware provides supported paths for migrating Update Manager from a Windows
operating system to run in the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA).
Update Manager can be migrated to vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) in the following
vCenter Server deployment models:
• vCenter Server and Update Manager run on the same Windows machine
• vCenter Server and Update Manager run on different Windows machines
• Update Manager runs on a Windows machine and is connected to a vCenter
Server Appliance (vCSA)
For detailed information how to perform migration, see the Installing and Administering
VMware vSphere Update Manager and the vSphere Upgrade documentation.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
vCenter Server Availability

VMware vCenter® Server Appliance™ (vCSA) sits at the heart of vSphere and provides
services to manage various components of a virtual infrastructure like ESXi hosts, virtual
machines, and storage and networking resources. As large virtual infrastructures are
built using vSphere, vCenter Server becomes an important element in ensuring the
business continuity of an organization. vCenter Server must protect itself from a set of
hardware and software failures in an environment and must recover transparently from
such failures. vSphere 6.5 provides a brand new high availability solution for vCenter
Server, known as vCenter Server High Availability, or VCHA. VCHA is only available for
the vCenter Server Appliance.
vCenter Server High Availability protects vCenter Server Appliance against host and
hardware failures. The active-passive architecture of the solution can also help you
reduce downtime significantly when you patch the vCenter Server Appliance.
vCenter High Availability is a three-node cluster that contains an Active, Passive, and
Witness nodes. Two different configuration paths are available called Basic and
Advanced. What you select depends on your existing configuration but both Basic and
Advanced result in exact same capabilities. In other words, use Basic whenever
possible. If the vCenter Server being enabled for vCenter HA is being managed by a
different vCenter Server in a separate SSO Domain or the Active, Passive, and Witness
nodes are going to be managed by different vCenter Servers, the Advanced workflow
will be required.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Architecture Overview
A vCenter HA cluster consists of three vCenter Server Appliance instances. The first
instance, initially used as the Active node, is cloned twice to a Passive node and to a
Witness node. Together, the three nodes provide an active-passive failover solution.
Deploying each of the nodes on a different ESXi instance protects against hardware
failure. Adding the three ESXi hosts to a DRS cluster can further protect your
environment. If using the Basic workflow to enable vCenter HA, then the workflow will
automatically place the nodes on different hosts and create anti-affinity rules for you if
DRS is enabled. If the Advanced workflow is being used then node placement is manual
as is the creation of any DRS rules.
When the vCenter HA configuration is complete, only the Active node has an active
management interface (public IP). The three nodes communicate over a private network
called vCenter HA network that is set up as part of configuration. The Active node and
the Passive node are continuously replicating data.
Roles for each type of node in a vCenter HA cluster
Active Node:
HOL-1811-02-SDC
• Node that runs the active instance of vCenter Server

• Enables and uses the public IP address of the cluster
Passive Node:
• Node that runs as the passive instance of vCenter Server

• Constantly receives state updates from the Active node via both PostgreSQL
replication (synchronous) and rsync file-based replication (near synchronous)
• Equivalent to the Active node in terms of resources
• Takes over the role of Active Node in the event of failover
Witness Node:
• Serves as a quorum node

• Used to break a tie in the event of a network partition causing a situation where
the Active and Passive nodes cannot communicate with each other
• A light-weight VM utilizing a reduced set of hardware resources (1 vCPU & 1 GB
RAM, same disk footprint as the original vCenter Server)
• Does not take over role of Active/Passive nodes
How does vCenter Server High Availability work?
Availability of the vCenter Server Appliance works as follows under the following failure
conditions:
1. Active node fails: As long as the Passive node and the Witness node can
communicate with each other, the Passive node will promote itself to Active and
start serving client requests.
2. Passive node fails: As long as the Active node and the Witness node can
communicate with each other, the Active node will continue to operate as Active
and continue to serve client requests.
3. Witness node fails: As long as the Active node and the Passive node can
communicate with each other, the Active node will continue to operate as Active
and continue to serve client requests. The Passive node will continue to watch the
Active node for failover.
4. More than one node fails or is isolated: This means all three nodes - Active,
Passive, and Witness - cannot communicate with each other. This is more than a
single point of failure and when this happens, the cluster is assumed non-
functional and the vCenter Server application shuts down to protect itself from
data corruption.
5. Isolated node behavior: When a single node gets isolated from the cluster, it is
automatically taken out of the cluster and all services are stopped. For example,
if an Active node is isolated, all services are stopped to ensure that the Passive
node can take over as long as it is connected to the Witness node. Isolated node
detection takes into consideration intermittent network glitches and resolves to
an isolated state only after all retry attempts have been exhausted.
Note that the RTO for a failover is approximately 5 minutes.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Platform Services Controller

Topologies & Platform Services
Controller High Availability
The Platform Services Controller provides a set of common infrastructure services to the
vSphere environment. The services include licensing, certificate management, and
authentication with vCenter Single Sign-On. In this module we will cover each of these
topologies and the High Availability options for the Platform Services Controller.
vCenter Server and Platform Services Controller

Deployment Types
As mentioned, you can deploy vCenter Server as an Appliance or install vCenter Server
for Windows. With Windows, you can also install/configure with an embedded or
external Platform Services Controller. Like vCenter, the Platform Services Controller can
be installed as an appliance or installed on Windows.
Before you deploy the vCenter Server Appliance or install vCenter Server for Windows,
you must determine the deployment model that is suitable for your environment. The
different types of deployment models are discussed in detail in the following lessons.
vCenter Server with an Embedded Platform Services

Controller
All services that are bundled with the Platform Services Controller are deployed together
(embedded) with the vCenter Server services on the same virtual machine or physical
server.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
You cannot join additional vCenter Server or Platform Services Controller instances to
this vCenter Single Sign-On domain.
In vSphere 6.0, replicating embedded PSCs (also called Enhanced Linked Mode) was
deprecated. Therefore, in vSphere 6.5, connecting multiple embedded PSCs in Enhanced
Linked Mode is not supported.
Deployment Workflow of a vCenter Server Appliance with

an Embedded Platform Services Controller
Prerequisites:
• Verify that your system meets the minimum software and hardware
requirements.
• Download the vCenter Server Appliance Installer.
Procedure:
Stage 1 - Deploy the OVF file as a vCenter Server Appliance with an embedded
Platform Services Controller.
• With stage 1 of the deployment process, you deploy the OVF file, which is
included in the vCenter Server Appliance installer, as a vCenter Server Appliance
with an embedded Platform Services Controller.
Stage 2 - Set Up the newly deployed vCenter Server Appliance with an embedded
Platform Services Controller.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
• When the OVF deployment completes, you are redirected to stage 2 of the
deployment process to set up and start the services of the newly deployed
vCenter Server Appliance with an embedded Platform Services Controller.
Note: Due to the existing configuration required within vCenter for this lab, it was not
possible to have you perform this process in this lab.
Platform Services Controller and vCenter Server Appliance

with an External Platform Services Controller
You can deploy a vCenter Server Appliance with an external Platform Services
Controller. This way you deploy two different appliances.
To have the Platform Services Controller and the vCenter Server instance deployed as
two different appliances, first deploy the Platform Services Controller, then deploy
vCenter Server as another virtual appliance. Then register the vCenter Server Appliance
to the Platform Services Controller.
You can also register multiple instances of vCenter Server to work with one common
external Platform Services Controller instance. All vCenter Server instances that are
registered with one or multiple joined Platform Services Controller instances are
connected in Enhanced Linked Mode.
Installing vCenter Server with an external Platform Services Controller has the
following advantages:
• Less resources consumed by the shared services in the Platform Services

Controller instances enables a reduced footprint and reduced maintenance.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
• This model is suitable for large-scale environments that consist of multiple

vCenter Server instances.
Installing vCenter Server with an external Platform Services Controller has the
following disadvantages:
• The connection between vCenter Server and Platform Services Controller is over
the network and is prone to connectivity and name resolution issues.
• If you install vCenter Server on Windows virtual machines or physical servers, you
need more Microsoft Windows licenses.
• You must manage more virtual machines or physical servers.
Deployment Topologies with External Platform Services

Controller Instances
Multiple external PSCs can be deployed at a single site serving one or more vCenter
Server system. A load balancer is required to front-end the PSC instances. By having
more than one PSC instance behind the load balancer, the PSC can be made highly
available.
Compatible Load Balancers:
• F5 Networks Big-IP
• NSX for vSphere (NSX-v)
• Citrix NetScaler
Example of a Pair of Platform Services Controller Instances

in High Availability
HOL-1811-02-SDC
• 1 vSphere Single Sign-On domain

• 2 vSphere Single Sign-On sites
• 2 or more external Platform Services Controllers per Single Sign-On Site
• 1 or more vCenter Server with external Platform Services Controllers
• 1 third-party load balancer per site
Platform Services Controller Across vCenter Single Sign-

On Sites
• 1 Single Sign-On domain

• 2 Single Sign-On sites
• 2 or more external Platform Services Controllers per Single Sign-On Site
• 1 or more vCenter Server with external Platform Services Controllers
Limitations
• In the event of a Platform Services Controller failover the vCenter Servers will
need to be manually repointed to the functioning Platform Services Controller.
• vCenter Servers attached to higher latency Platform Services Controller may
experience performance issues
Platform Services Controller High Availability with vCSA -

Walkthrough
This walkthrough demonstrates how to install and configure highly available Platform
Services Controllers using the VMware vCenter Server Appliance. Use the arrow keys to
navigate through the screens. Please take note that this is based on vSphere 6.0
which may differ slightly from the 6.5 process. Once completed, remember to
close the browser tab this was open in. For detail about the process for 6.5,
you may also refer to this KB article which includes a walkthrough.
https://featurewalkthrough.vmware.com/#!/vsphere-6-0/vcenter-server-install/vcenter-
server-6-0-psc-ha-vcsa
HOL-1811-02-SDC
vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA)

Backup
In vSphere 6.5, the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) has an out-of-the-box file-based
backup and restore solution. You can back up to a single folder all of vCenter Server’s
core configuration, inventory, and historical data. All of this data is streamed over FTP
(or SFTP / FTPS) or HTTP / HTTPS. When it is time to restore to a previous backup, you
can deploy a fresh appliance, point to the folder location of the vCenter Server backup
files, and restore all of vCenter Server's configuration and inventory data (with optional
historical data) from the backup.
In this lesson we will go through the steps to create a backup of the vCenter Server
Appliance (vCSA) and then verify the back up. The restore process will be described and
shown in the following lesson Hands-on Labs Interactive Simulation: vCenter
Appliance Restore in the next lesson.
Open Chrome Browser from Windows Quick Launch Task

Bar
1. Click on the Chrome Icon on the Windows Quick Launch Task Bar.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Gain screen space in Chrome by zooming out
1. Select the Options menu in Chrome.

2. Click the '-' button to zoom out to 90%
This will provide more viewing space while still allowing you to read the text.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Log in to Appliance Management UI
You will back up your vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) configuration files, inventory, and
selected historical data to a folder of files placed on an FTP server.  
Log in to the Appliance Management UI to monitor the vCenter Server

Appliance (vCSA) and begin the vCenter Server backup process.
1. Click the HOL Admin bookmark.

2. Click the vcsa-01a Mgmt shortcut in the drop-down.
3. Type root for the username.
4. Type VMware1! for the password.
5. Click the Login button.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Back up the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) using the

Backup Appliance Wizard
Backing up the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) starts on the summary page of the
Appliance Management UI (port 5480 of your vSphere web client IP / hostname).
 To begin the process of backing up the appliance:
1. Click the Backup icon in the upper right corner of the Appliance Management UI.
Backup Appliance Wizard - Enter Backup Type and

Location
HOL-1811-02-SDC
The first set of information you will need to enter are backup protocol (FTP, FTPS, SFTP,
HTTP, HTTPS), the backup location or path, and a username/password for accessing that
backup location.
 You also have the option of encrypting your data before any of it is transferred to the
backup location, by checking the “Encrypt Backup Data” box. Note that the password
you set here would be needed during the Restore process to access the vCenter Server
Appliance (vCSA) backup. For this lab, leave “Encrypt Backup Data” unselected.
You will need to access this FTP server to place your vCenter Server backup files. You
can create a new folder on the FTP path by adding to the path name after the IP address
of the FTP server. Please name the VC backup folder “vcsa01a-backup”.
1. Click the Backup Protocol drop-down and select FTP. The drop-down does
show you all the possible protocols.
2. In the Backup Location field, type 192.168.110.60/vcsa01a-backup.
3. Port keep as 21
4. In the Username field, type root.
5. In the Password field, type VMware1!  .
6. Click the Next button to continue.
Note: The path in the Backup UI should be entered without ftp://, so that the Backup
location should start with the FTP server’s IP address itself. You will also notice (see
arrows) that you can Encrypt the backup and it will warn you when you are using the
unsecure FTP/HTTP protocols. This is a fenced lab, so the need for a secured protocol is
not necessary.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Backup Appliance Wizard - Select parts to backup
Next, you’ll want to select whether you choose to back up optional Stats, Events,
Alarms, and Tasks (SEAT) data from the vCenter Server database. A core set of data (VC
inventory, services, and OS) will be backed up by default.
1. Leave the checkbox marked Stats, Events, Alarms, and Tasks checked to
include this data in the backup.
2. Type vCenter Backup Primary DC in the Description field to help identify this
backup.
3. Click the Next button to continue.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Backup Appliance Wizard - Ready to complete
The third and last step provides a backup summary which gives you a confirmation of
your backup protocol, location, credentials, encryption, and optional data.
1. Confirm the selections are correct.

2. Begin the backup by clicking the Finish button.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Backup Appliance Wizard - Progress Window
A pop-up window with the backup status will be displayed.
1. Once the backup is complete, Click the OK button to close the Backup Progress
window.
Verify the backup was successful
Once the backup is complete, we need confirm the backup was successful.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
1. Overwrite the address box with ftp://192.168.110.60.

2. An Authentication Required window will be displayed. Type root in the User
Name field.
3. Type VMware1! in the Password field.
4. Click the Log In button.
Verify the backup was successful - Continued...
1. Verify that vcas01a-backup exists and click on the link.

2. The next screen shows the content stored in the vcsa01a-backup folder.
What is actually backed up (Content Library)
To add some specifics for the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) backup, let’s consider a
content library that resides within the vCenter Server Appliance. A Content Library
stores it's metadata (the library’s description) in the vCenter embedded Postgres
HOL-1811-02-SDC
database and has its services running in a vCenter Server. It stores it's content (OVF,
VMDK, ISO, etc.) in a Datastore outside the vCenter Server Appliance. That means that
the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) backup only captures the metadata of the library.
 Note: For more information on the Content library, please refer to lab
HOL-1811-01-SDC Module 1 - What's New in vSphere?
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Hands-on Labs Interactive Simulation:

vCenter Server Appliance Restore
The vCenter Server Appliance Restore process consists of two stages:
• Stage 1: Deploy a fresh appliance / OVF

• Stage 2: Setting up the vCenter Server Appliance
This part of the lab is presented as a Hands-on Labs Interactive Simulation. This will
allow you to experience steps which are too time-consuming or resource intensive to do
live in the lab environment. In this simulation, you can use the software interface as if
you are interacting with a live environment.
This simulation will go through each stage to restore a vCenter Server Appliance.
1. Click here to open the interactive simulation. It will open in a new browser
window or tab.
2. When finished, click the "Return to the lab" link or close the windows to continue
with this lab.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Migration Assistant
VMware provides supported paths for migrating and upgrading from vCenter Server
version 5.5 and version 6.0 installations on Windows to the vCenter Server 6.5
Appliance. This section will provide a brief overview of these migration paths and the
Migration Assistant for vSphere 6.5
Supported vSphere Migration Paths
You can migrate the following deployments as described in the following table.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Overview of Migration from vCenter Server on Windows to

an Appliance
The Migration Assistant contains the following characteristics:
• Windows console application (see screen capture).

• Guides the user with the migration process.
• Enables target vCenter Server Appliance to run remote commands on the source
vCenter Windows machine.
• Delivered as part of the vCenter Server Appliance ISO.
• No installation is required.
• Migration through GUI or CLI.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Migration Workflow
The workflow shown here describes the high level tasks for vCenter Server on Windows
Migration to a vCenter Server Appliance on Linux.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Note: For a deeper understanding of the Migration Assistant, make sure to complete
HOL-1811-02-SDC Module 7 - vCenter Server Appliance Migration as it
demonstrates use cases for the Migration Assistant.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Conclusion
The vCenter Server Appliance is the new standard when it comes vCenter. It
has surpassed the Windows based vCenter in functionality and matches it in
scalability. This module introduced to many of the new features that are part
of the vCenter Server Appliance, discussed architectural considerations, and
described migrations paths to assist with moving to the Appliance.
You've finished Module 1
Congratulations on completing Module 1.
If you are looking for additional information on vCenter Server Appliance, try one of
these:
• Click on this link for a playlist of videos that describe many of the enhancements
and new features in vSphere 6.5: VMware vSphere 6.5 Youtube videos.
• You may also explore VMware 6.5 Feature Walkthrough which will step you
through a number of the new features in vSphere 6.5 so you can explore them at
your pace.
• Consider taking 1811-03-SDC vSphere with Operations Management: Advanced
Topics to learn about advanced administration topics.
Proceed to any module below which interests you most.

• Module 3 - Getting Familiar with vRealize Operations (30 minutes) (Basic)
HOL-1811-02-SDC

How to End Lab
If this is the last module you would like to take in this lab, you may end your lab by
clicking on the END button.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Module 2 - Next
Generation Management
Clients (45 Minutes)
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Introduction
• Lesson 1: VMware Host Client Overview - This lesson will introduce you to am
HTML-5 based client specifically for managing individual hosts.
• Lesson 2: vSphere HTML5 Client and Web Client Enhancements - This lesson
explain the different clients that can be used to manage vCenter and does a basic
walkthrough of the Web Client.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
VMware Host Client Overview

The VMware Host Client is an HTML5-based client that is used to connect to and manage
single ESXi hosts.
You can use the VMware Host Client to perform administrative and basic troubleshooting
tasks, as well as advanced administrative tasks on your target ESXi host. You can also
use the VMware Host Client to conduct emergency management when vCenter Server is
not available.
It is important to know that the VMware Host Client is different from the vSphere Web
Client, regardless of their similar user interfaces. You use the vSphere Web Client to
connect to vCenter Server and manage multiple ESXi hosts, whereas you use the
VMware Host Client to manage a single ESXi host.
VMware Host Client functions include, but are not limited to the following operations:
• Basic virtualization operations, such as deploying and configuring virtual

machines of various complexity
• Creating and managing networking and datastores
• Advanced tuning of host level options to improve performance
NOTE: The VMware Host Client only works for administrative users.
VMware Host Client Requirements
Make sure that your browser supports the VMware Host Client.
The following Guest Operating systems and Web Browser versions are supported for the
VMware Host Client.
Supported Guest Operating Systems and Browser Versions for the VMware Host Client
are shown here in the above table.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Using the VMware Host Client
The embedded VMware Host Client is an HTML5-based client that has a similar interface
to the vSphere Web Client but is only used to manage single ESXi hosts. You use the
VMware Host Client to conduct emergency management when vCenter Server is
temporarily unavailable.

Bar

HOL-1811-02-SDC
VMware Host Client and Log In
Procedure
In the Google Chrome Web browser enter the target host name or IP address using the
adress https://esx-01a.corp.local/ui/#
A log in screen appears.
1. Enter User name: root and Password: VMware1!

2. Click Login to continue.
You may or may not be presented with a VMware Customer Experience Improvement
Program (CEIP) page. If so, uncheck you want to join the program and click OK.
You are now logged in to your target ESXi host.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Host Management
A similar interface to the vSphere Web Client, it too has a Navigation pane and shortcuts
that you can use to manage the individual host.
1. Minimize Recent Tasks to expand your view of the Host window
Manage Advanced Settings in the VMware Host Client
With the VMware Host Client, you can manage advanced host settings, assign or remove
licenses to your host, configure start and stop policies for host services, and manage
time and date configuration for the host.
1. Select Manage within Navigator

2. Click each tab to view
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Monitoring an ESXi Host in the VMware Host Client
When you connect to a host using the VMware Host Client, you can monitor the host
health status, and view performance charts, events, tasks, system logs, and
notifications.
1. Select Monitor within Navigator

2. Click each tab to view
Log Out of the VMware Host Client
When you no longer need to view or manage your target ESXi host, log out of the
VMware Host Client.
NOTE: Closing a VMware Host Client session does not stop the host.
Procedure
• To log out of the ESXi host, click the user name at the top of the VMware Host
Client window and select Log out from the drop-down menu.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
You are now logged out of the VMware Host Client. Your target ESXi host continues to
run all its normal activities.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
vSphere HTML5 Client and Web Client

Enhancements
New Web Client UI features like Custom Attributes, Object Tabs, and Live
Refresh are presented alongside other performance and usability improvements.
In the following steps lets explore the vSphere Web Client's latest features as part of this
overview.
HTML5-based vSphere Client
The HTML5-based vSphere Client (or just vSphere Client) is now the preferred method
for managing your vSphere infrastructure. For the time being, there are some tasks
which still require the Web Client, which has also been improved in 6.5.
There are currently two versions of the new HTML5-based vSphere Client (or just
vSphere Client) – an unsupported Fling version that receives regular (sometimes
weekly) updates with new features and bug fixes. There is also a GA (generally
available) fully supported version that is bundled with vCenter Server 6.5 and later. As
we add new features and functionality to the vSphere Client, they will be added first to
the Fling version and once mature will be moved to the GA version of vCenter Server
through patches and updates. For example, the original release of vCenter Server 6.5
(November 15, 2016) contained a version of the vSphere Client that was roughly v2.7 of
the vSphere Client Fling. When VMware released vCenter Server 6.5.0b (March 14,
2017) the vSphere Client was updated to be roughly equivalent to version 3.2 of the
Fling but in a fully supported package. More information about this particular update can
be found here: https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2017/03/first-vsphere-client-
html5-update-vsphere-6-5-b.html.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
VMware will continue to release updates to the vSphere Client Fling on a frequent basis
and then bring those features into the GA product through patches and updates until
the vSphere Client is complete. The vSphere Client is a top priority for VMware and
feedback remains to be very important. Please consider using the built-in feedback tool
within both the Fling and GA versions of the vSphere Client to help us prioritize features
and deliver a cross-platform client that enables a smooth, performant, and enjoyable
vSphere administration experience.
Some of the key features of the vSphere Client are:
• VM Power Operations (common cases)

• VM Edit Settings (simple CPU, Memory, Disk changes)
• VM Console
• VM and Host Summary pages
• VM Migration (only to a Host)
• Clone to Template/VM
• Create VM on a Host (limited)
• Additional monitoring views (Performance charts, Tasks, Events)
• Global Views (Recent tasks, Alarms--view only)
Functionality Updates for the vSphere Client
HOL-1811-02-SDC
http://pubs.vmware.com/Release_Notes/en/vsphere/65/vsphere-
client-65-html5-functionality-support.html
vSphere Web Client
As mentioned before, while the vSphere Client is the preferred tool to manage vSphere,
there are some tasks that will still require you to use the vSphere Web Client. The rest of
this lesson walks you through the Web Client to make sure you are familiar with it.

Bar

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Navigation and shortcuts
1. Open the vSphere Web Client for the RegionB vCenter using your Google
Chrome web browser
2. User name: administrator@vsphere.local
3. Password: VMware1!
4. Click Login
Note: The Inventory Tree will be the default view.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Task #1 - Use Keyboard Short Cuts for Navigation and

View Them in Home Menu
Keyboard shortcuts are present in the 5.5 and 6.0 vSphere Web Client, but were not
visible. You can now see these shortcuts by hovering your mouse over the Home menu
(see above screen capture).
View the objects in your vSphere environment using the key combinations in the
following steps to quickly navigate between Home, the vCenter Inventory Lists, and the
4 inventory trees:
Note: Ctrl+Command work on a Mac
1. Ctrl+Alt+1 – Home screen

2. Ctrl+Alt+2 – vCenter Inventory Lists (Object Navigator)
3. Ctrl+Alt+3 – Hosts and Clusters tree
4. Ctrl+Alt+4 – VMs and Templates tree
5. Ctrl+Alt+5 – Storage tree
6. Ctrl+Alt+6 – Networking tree
After reviewing these Click Home to enter the Home Screen
Recent Objects Pane
The Recent Objects global pane is available in the lower left corner of the vSphere
Web Client view. For optimum viewing we have this pane "unpinned" or what is also
referred to as "minimized".
HOL-1811-02-SDC
1. Click Recent Objects in the lower left hand corner of the screen to pin this pane
for viewing.
Recent objects are displayed in two separate tabs:
• Viewed
• Created
As you select objects in the Navigator pane, the objects appear in the Viewed tab. As
you create objects during your user session, the new objects appear in the Created tab.
In each tab, the most recently viewed objects appear at the top, and the maximum
number of items is 10.
Object Tabs
In prior releases, all objects within a container, or related to an object, appeared under
the Related Objects tab. This tab has been replaced with top-level tabs that categorize
the related objects as: Hosts, VMs, Datastores, and Networks. This change has
been made for all vSphere objects, and only the applicable categories are shown for
each object type (for a VM, the tabs are Datastores, and Networks).
This example shows "vcsa-01b.corp.local" is the selected object. (For best viewing
results you may need to maximize your window in this lab)
Object Details Titlebar: Action Icons
HOL-1811-02-SDC
The Object Details titlebar displays the selected object’s icon and name,
action icons, and the Actions menu. Using the action icons, you can now perform
common actions with a single click.
This example shows "vcsa-01b.corp.local" is the selected object.
Custom Attributes
The following steps will cover creating, renaming and deleting Custom Attributes.
1. Select "vcsa-01b.corp.local"
2. Click Home button
3. Select Tags & Custom Attributes
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Task 1. Creating Custom Attributes using the Global

Custom Attributes View (Copy)
1. Select the Custom Attributes tab. You can see all the custom attributes defined
in this vCenter Server.
2. Select "vcsa-01b.corp.local"
3. To create a new Custom Attribute, click the Add icon and the New Custom
Attribute dialog appears.
4. Enter VM_custom in the Attribute field and choose Virtual Machine from the
Type combo box.  The new attribute will be available for objects of the selected
type. If you choose Global, the new attribute will be available for all object types.
Click OK or press Enter. The new attribute appears in the list.  
5. Repeat steps 3-4 to create another custom attribute: Attribute name:
vApp_custom Type: Virtual App
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Task 2: Renaming Custom Attributes using the Global

Custom Attributes view
1. Select vApp_custom in the list.

2. Click the Edit… button. The Edit Custom Attribute dialog appears. The name is
preselected in the Attribute text field.
3. Rename the attribute: vApp_custom_upd and click OK. In the list, the selected
attribute’s name changes to the one you just entered.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Task 3: Deleting Custom Attributes using the Global

Custom Attributes view
1. Select vApp_custom_upd from the list view

2. Click the Delete button.
3. A confirmation appears. Press TAB to highlight the Yes button and press Enter
(or click Yes). The attribute is removed from the list and repeat the previous
steps to delete custom attribute: VM_custom before moving to Step 4
4. Click drop down arrow next to Administrator@vsphere.local
5. Click Logout
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Live Refresh
Live refresh improves the original mechanism for refreshing recent tasks, triggered
alarms and the trees to now happen in real time. All users logged into vSphere Web
Client will see the real time updates as long as they have permission to see the
changes.
Conclusion
This concludes the section "vSphere HTML5 Client and Web Client Enhancements". You
should now have a solid understanding of the enhancements made to the vSphere Web
Client and the difference between the various clients.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Conclusion
This module introduced you to the tools you will be using to manage your ESXi
hosts and your virtual infrastructure. As you complete other Modules in this
lab, you will be using the vSphere Client, they preferred client moving
forward, except where one of the other clients is required.
If you are looking for additional information on Management Clients, try one of these:
your pace.
Topics to learn about advanced features in vSphere that require the use of the
vSphere Web Client for management.

HOL-1811-02-SDC

How to End Lab
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Module 3 - Getting
Familiar with vRealize
Operations (30 Minutes)
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Overview of vRealize Operations

Management
VMware vSphere with Operations Management (vSOM) delivers an environment
optimized for efficient server virtualization management. This is accomplished by
pairing VMware vSphere, the world's leading virtualization platform along with vRealize
Operations Manager. This combination adds critical capacity management, intelligent
alerting, performance monitoring and a host of other features/capabilities. It is
designed for businesses of all sizes to run applications at high service levels and
maximize hardware savings through higher capacity utilization and consolidation ratios.
Simplify IT Management of Virtual Infrastructure

Environments
vSphere with Operations Management offers a more intuitive user interface than
vCenter Server and improves monitoring capabilities by adding predictive analytics to
enable faster problem discovery and remediation as well as more efficient resource
management.
Key Features of VMware vSphere with Operations Management
Unified Command Console displays key performance indicators in easily identifiable

colored badges and provides a comprehensive view into what is driving current and
potential future performance and capacity management issues.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Performance Monitoring and Capacity Management analyzes vCenter Server

performance data and establishes dynamic thresholds that adapt to the environment
and provide smart alerts about health degradations, performance bottlenecks and
capacity shortfalls:
• Performance data is abstracted to health, risk and efficiency measures that

provides IT with operations visibility to effectively identify developing
performance. problems with less time and effort.
• Capacity management helps identify powered off, idle and over-provisioned VMs
to reclaim excess capacity and increase VM density without impacting
performance.
• Project modeling allows a user to model infrastructure changes (addition/deletion
of Hosts and VMs) to further assist with capacity planning.
• All of these capabilities are available in the Standard edition of vRealize
Operations Manager and the appliance can be deployed / accessible within
minutes.
Video: vSphere with Operations Management - Overview

(3:13)
Here is a short video that will show you the benefits of using vSOM in your environment.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Understanding the User Interface -

vRealize Operations Manager
User Interface Overview
vRealize Operations Manager 6.6 is a complete redesign, and simplification, of the User
Interface for Operations Manager. One of the major advantages to the new Product User
Interface (UI) is that the content panels are consistent while also being contextually
relevant. In this section we will highlight a few of the major interface components, so
that you can easily navigate the Product UI.

Bar
If the Google Chrome browser is not open from a previous lesson, launch the Chrome
browser:
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Gain screen space in vRealize Operations Product UI by

zooming out - (Chrome)
You may find that all information cannot be properly viewed on the screen. If this is the
case:

2. Click the '-' button to zoom out to 90% or whatever percent allows for adequate
viewing.
Note: This will provide more viewing space while still allowing you to read the text.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Log into vRealize Operations Manager
1. Click on the Bookmark vROPS and confirm you are connecting to

vrops-01a.corp.local.
2. Ensure the Authentication Source is VMware Indentity Manager.
3. Click REDIRECT
HOL-1811-02-SDC
vIDM
1. Userid: hol
3. Click Sign In
HOL-1811-02-SDC
New simplified Home Page
The new home page reflects the new simplified UI design in vRealize Operations
Manager 6.6. It is made up of three focus areas;
1. Title Bar
2. Navigation Pane
3. Content Pane
This lesson will provide a summary of each.
Recommended Actions
• A User drop-down allowing you to Log Out

◦ Set preferences.
◦ About button to provide information and the version of vRealize
Operations installed.
◦ Help button for getting additional online help.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Notifications
The Collection Notifications helps the Operations Manager admin know if there are any
data sources that are not sending data. A Click into the Adapter info brings the admin
right to information needed to diagnose any issues.
Refresh
The Refresh button, what can we say? It refreshes the page of course!
Quick Search
The Quick Search function auto-fills as you type and allows you to locate and view
Objects in your environment with a single mouse click.
Main Menu
The Main Menu is made up of:
• Home - Default View for user. Gives quick access to todos, Workload Balance, Log
Insight, and Infrastructure Costing.
• Dashboards - Direct Access to Data Visualization
• Alerts - Inbox for Alerts the User has access to, as well the place to define new
alerts
• Environment - Privileged menu to define Environment constructs such as
custom groups.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
• Administration - Operations Manager System Administrative funcrions, only

visible to administrators
Navigation Pane - Home
The Recomended Actions Page is the first page an admin will look at. It has a
consolidated view of any actions the admin need to effect Object in the Virtual
Infrastructure.
The view is broken into two primary windows, Scope and Suggested fix. Scope covers
logical grouping of Objects and all issues for these object groupings. For instance All
virtual machines and all alerts for all Virtual machines. Suggested Fix provides
recomendations on how to fix a challenge seen by Operations and offers actions that
can be taken to apply the fix.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Operations Overview
The Operations Overview page gives a quick snapshot view of the entire environment
that Operations is aware of. It covers a count snapshot of all objects n the Environment,
with growth count charts. A widget that quickly shows count of alerts for Virtual
Datacenters, along with Top 15 widget that show admin quickly the high level health of
the infrastructure.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Capacity Overview
The Capacity Overview page shows the current capacity status of CPU, Memory, and
Storage across the infrastructure, along with current high level reclaimable capacity
numbers .
Workload Balance
HOL-1811-02-SDC
The Workload Balance page shows the current balance status of the infrastructure,
based on the new Workload Balance functionality in vRealize Operations.
Log Insight SSO
Click on LOGIN VIA SSO
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Log Insight
The Log Insight page gives direct access to the Log Insight UI from vRealize
Operations.
vRealize Business
HOL-1811-02-SDC
The Business Management page gives diect SSO access to the vRealize Business for
Cloud (vRBC) UI, when vRBC is Installed and configured. This is not the case in this HOL
Lab. Also since the lab does not have internet access the intro Video will not load.
Navigation Pane - Dashboards
Dashboards, Views and Reports are all methods for viewing Objects/Metrics
collected (or calculated) by vRealize Operations. Customizing Dashboards or Reports is
not enable for vRealize Operations Standard which is part of the vSOM license key. You
can create customized Views with vRealize Operations Standard.
Note: You can click on any of the navigation links to verify data displayed in the
Content Pane. We will cover Dashboards and Alerts in detail in an upcoming modules.
Worth noting is that there are three distinct editions of vRealize Operations. They are
Standard, Advanced and Enterprise. From a high level, Standard is Out-of-the-Box
functionality. This version is EULA limited and cannot be mixed with Advanced or
Enterprise licenses within the same vRealize Operations cluster. Advanced is
customized infrastructure visibility. While Enterprise extends to customized application
level visibility. As an example, the Dashboard edit button is greyed out because this
feature is not enabled for vRealize Operations Standard, which is the edition for vSOM.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Navigation Pane - Alerts
The Alerts Page shows a chronologically sorted list of recent Alerts in your
environment that need attention. Alerts are categorized based on their criticality,
status, and impact on health, risk, or efficiency.
1. You can quickly filter Alerts by keyword in the form on the right side.
2. You can Group Alerts by Time, Criticality, Definition, and Object Type
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Alert Settings
The Alert Settings page allows you to customize:
• Alerts - The high level "surfaced" alert object - i.e. "Exchange MBX Layer Having
Performane Issues"
• Symptoms - The low level fine grained metric or event that can be part of a
complex Alert construct - i.e. "CPU Wait > threshold"
• Recomendations - A block of meta data on how to respond to the Alert.
Possibly a place for application run books to help admins with handling the
appropriate reponse to a performance issue.
• Actions - Automated or Manaul action that can be take in response to the
Recomendation. - i.e. a vCenter Action to shutdown or reboot the VM, or an api
call into a Ticketing system to begin the response to an Alert
• Notification Settings - External notification of the existance of the alert - i.e.
Email.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Navigation Pane - Environment
The Environment Overview page shows how objects like Virtual Machines, Datastores,
Operatings Systems, etc. are grouped in Operations Manager. This page is also how
admins can drill up and down the hierarchy and to view and understand the
relationships of all objects in vRealize Operations Manager
Groups and Applications currently have three constructs; Custom Groups, Applications
and Custom Datacenters. Custom Groups is the most powerful construct and is used
by policies to segment what policy is associated with what object. Applications is a
legacy construct associated with VMware Infrastructure Navigator (VIN). Unless you
have installed and integrated VIN, you will not need to use this construct. And Custom
Datacenters is a construct used for Workload Placement (WLP).
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Navigation Pane - Administration
The Administration Page contains all administration options including Solutions

(Adapters), User Management and Support tools.
• Solutions - vRealize Operations Manager includes a page where you can add and
manage solutions, which include the adapters that connects you to the data to
monitor and manage. Solutions are delivered as management packs that include
content and adapters. Adapters are how vRealize Operations Manager manages
communication and integration with other products, applications, and functions.
• Policies - The Active Policies tab displays the policies associated with groups of
objects. You can manage the active policies for the objects in your environment
so that you can have vRealize Operations Manager analyze and display specific
data about those objects in dashboards, views, and reports.
• Access
◦ Credentials - Provides all the usernames and settings to access the
different Management Packs / Adapter instances.
◦ Access Control - Each user must have a unique account with one or more
roles assigned to enforce role-based security when they use vRealize
Operations Manager. You create a user account, and assign the account to
be a member of one or more user groups to allow the user to inherit the
roles associated with the user group and to access the objects associated
with the user group. You assign individual role types to the user to set their
privileges, and select the objects in your environment that the user can
access.
• Configuration
HOL-1811-02-SDC
◦ Maintenance Schedules - Maintenance schedules prevent vRealize

Operations Manager from showing misleading data from resources that are
offline or in other unusual states because of maintenance.
• Management
◦ Licensing - vRealize Operations allows for the addition of multiple license
keys that can be grouped and associated with different Hosts/VMs. CPU
and OSI (Operating System Instance) license keys can be mixed, however
Standard cannot be mixed with Advanced/Enterprise based on the EULA.
◦ Object Relationship - Objects in an enterprise environment are related to
other objects in that environment. Objects are either part of a larger
object, or they contain smaller component objects, or both. Object
Relationship provide a method to view/navigate object relationships.
◦ Cluster Management - Deals with the specific nodes in the environment
and provides their status. This includes Master, Master Replica, Data and
Remote Collector nodes.
◦ Certificates - Stores all the certificates and provides a location to view/
delete specific Certificates.
◦ Outbound Settings - contains all the configured outbound configurations
and the associated settings.
◦ Collector Groups - Is a new feature as of version 6.1, which provides fault
toleration for remote collectors by create a Collector Group. Enabling
vRealize Operations High Availability (HA) from the Admin UI and
configuring Colector Groups are two ways to increase the level of fault
tolerance for your vRealize Operations deployment.
◦ Global Settings - Has over a dozen global settings covering things like
Alert/Symptom retention, time series data collection and whether to
perform Dynamic Threshold and Capacity calculations (to name a few).
• History
◦ Audit - Provides three types of audit reports; User Activities, User
Permissions and System. The System audit is useful for monitoring
configured and collecting Objects/Metrics. Keeping an eye on this value as
your environment grows will keep you from exceeding the design capacity
of your vRealize Operations cluster.
◦ Recent Tasks - Provides the ability to view/search tasks.
• Support - Has several features and provides a quick way to generate a Support
Bundle, should you run into an issue and need to open a VMware Support
Request.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Conclusion
This concludes the section "Understanding the User Interface - vRealize Operations".
You should have a solid understanding of navigating and identifying where key content
is located within vRealize Operations.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Exploring vRealize Operations Manager

vRealize Operations Manager 6.6 is a complete redesign, and simplification, of the User
Interface for Operations Manager. This section will cover a couple of key areas of the
vRealize Operations Manager tool by exploring Dashboards and Reports.

Bar
If the Google Chrome browser is not open from a previous lesson, launch the Chrome
browser:
Gain screen space in vRealize Operations Product UI by

zooming out - (Chrome)
You may find that all information cannot be properly viewed on the screen. If this is the
case:
HOL-1811-02-SDC

2. Click the '-' button to zoom out to 90% or whatever percent allows for adequate
viewing.
Note: This will provide more viewing space while still allowing you to read the text.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
1. Click on the Bookmark vROPS and confirm you are connecting to

vrops-01a.corp.local.
2. Ensure the Authentication Source is VMware Indentity Manager.
3. Click REDIRECT
vIDM
1. Userid: hol
3. Click Sign In
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Exploring Dashboards
vRealize Operations Dashboards present a visual overview of the performance and state
of objects in your virtual infrastructure. You use dashboards to determine the nature
and timeframe of existing and potential issues within your environment. Through the
Advanced and Enterprise editions, this can be extended to your physical infrastructure
as well.
When you first log in to vRealize Operations Manager, you will land on the Home page.
To access the available dashboards click on Dashboards, you will land on the Getting
Started Dashboard.
From this page you can scroll through the different Catagories of Dashboards and select
them to use. This will then activate them in the UI and add them to the list on the in the
left pane..
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Enabling and Disabling Dashboards
Look through the catagories and choose a few Dashboards from different Catagories.
When you are done adding Dashboards your picture will most likely look different from
the one above. You have now added some number of dashboards to your UI, they will
stay there and be available the next time you log in. To manage this list a little easier
you can click the All Dashboards drop down
HOL-1811-02-SDC
You can see here the complete list of out of the box Dashboards, from here you can click
on individual Dasboards, evident by the "speedo" icon, or make all dashboards in a
catagory visible or hidden by clicking the checkbox at the front of the catagory name
Exploring Reports
Click on Reports in the Dashboards menu. Reports are a scheduled snapshot of views
and dashboards.
With vRealize Operations Manager reporting functions, you can generate a report to
capture details related to current or predicted resource needs. You can download the
report in PDF or CSV file format for future and offline needs. Reports can also be
scheduled to run at a user defined interval and emailed to recipients.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Run a Report
Reports are run from the Reports Templates Tab. On the Report Template tab, you
can run, schedule, and export report templates.
All templates that are applicable for the selected object are listed on the Report
Templates tab. You can order them by report name, subject, date they were modified,
last run, or owner.
To run a report:
1. Highlight the Report Cluster Configuration Summary

2. Click Run Template
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Choose Subject
NOTE: The picture above may not match exactly. Follow the steps and all will
be well!
1. Click the top Dropdown

2. Choose vSphere Hosts and Clusters
3. Expand vSphere World until you reach the cluster RegionA01-COMP01
4. Click OK
HOL-1811-02-SDC
View Generated Reports
1. Click the Generated Reports tab

2. Wait for the Report to finish
3. Click on the PDF icon to download the report
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Save Report
Click Save
Open Report
Once the PDF is done downloading double click it to open it.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Viewing the Report
The Title page will show pertinent information regarding the report including the object
it was run against, when it was run, and who ran the report.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Understanding the Report
Scroll to the bottom (3rd page) to see the details of the report. The 2nd page is the
contents page. The Cluster Configuration Summary shows the high level configration
for Clusters in your environment. It cover resources like CPU and Memory as well as
weather DRS is enabled or not, along with Parent vCenter information.
In our lab, we have a very small environment imagine the value of a report like this in a
much larger environment with 50 hosts and 2000 VMs.
Note: You can also export a report in CSV format, which depending on the report
content may be a more useful format.
Conclusion
This concluded this lesson. You should now have a solid understanding of Dashboards
and Reports.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Module 4 - Introduction to
vRealize Log Insight (30
Minutes)
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Overview of vRealize Log Insight

vRealize Log Insight delivers real-time log management for VMware environments, with
machine learning-based Intelligent Grouping, high performance search and better
troubleshooting across physical, virtual, and cloud environments.
High Performance Ingestion
vRealize Log Insight can process any type of log or machine generated data. vRealize
Log Insight supports very high throughput rates and low latency. vRealize Log Insight
possesses a collection framework, which accepts data through syslog, Windows and
Linux agents, or via a RESTful Ingestion API.
Scalability
vRealize Log Insight can scale out by using multiple virtual appliance instances. This
enables linear scaling of the ingestion throughput, increases query performance and
allows for ingestion high availability. In cluster mode, vRealize Log Insight provides
master and worker nodes. Both master and worker nodes are responsible for a subset of
data. Master nodes can query all subsets of data and aggregate the results. vRealize
Log Insight provides an internal Load Balancer for scale out, allowing you to load
balance and scale out from out of the box.
Real-Time Search
Data ingested by vRealize Log Insight is available for search within seconds. Also,
historical data can be searched from the same interface with the same low latency.
vRealize Log Insight supports complete keyword queries. Keywords are defined as any
alpha-numeric, hyphen, or underscore characters. In addition to the complete keyword
queries, vRealize Log Insight supports glob queries (for example, erro?, vm*) and field
based filtering (for example, hostname does NOT match test*, IP contains "10.64").
Furthermore, log message fields that contain numeric values can be used to define
selection filters (for example, CPU>80, 10<threads<100, and so on).
Search results are presented as individual events. Each event comes from a single
source, but search results may come from multiple sources. You can use vRealize Log
Insight to correlate the data on one or multiple dimensions (for example, time and
request identifiers) providing a coherent view across the stack. This way, root cause
analysis becomes much easier.
vRealize Log Insight Agent
vRealize Log Insight uses a native Windows and Linux agent to gather log data from
Windows and Linux servers as well as desktops. You can collect events from Windows
event channels and log files, and forward them to the vRealize Log Insight server. Some
of the benefits are centralized configuration, ease of use, data compression, and
HOL-1811-02-SDC
encryption. 3rd party agents are supported as well, but those benefits listed above
provide unique advantages by using our native agent.
Intelligent Grouping
vRealize Log Insight uses a new machine learning technology. Intelligent Grouping scans
incoming unstructured data and quickly groups messages together by problem type in
order to give you the ability to rapidly understand issues that may span your physical,
virtual, and hybrid cloud environments. The Event Trends tab in the Interactive Analytics
page provides automatic analysis of your events with context around new insights and
anomaly detection. We can now see how events are trending in a specified time interval
and easily detect ones that are potentially affecting the health of your environment or
application.
Aggregation
Fields that are extracted from log data can be used for aggregation. This is similar to the
functionality that GROUP-BY queries provide in a relational database or pivot-tables in
Microsoft Excel. The difference is that there is no need for extract, transform, and load
(ETL) processes and vRealize Log Insight scales to any size of data.
You can generate aggregate views of the data and identify specific events or errors
without having to access multiple systems and applications. For example, while viewing
an important system metric, for example the number of errors per minute, you can drill
down to a specific time-range of events and examine the errors that occurred in the
environment.
Runtime Field Extraction
Raw log data is not always easy to understand, and you might need to process some
data to identify the fields that are important for searching and aggregation. vRealize Log
Insight extracts most fields automatically, and you can dynamically extract a new field
from the data. It is as easy as double-clicking the message text and selecting “Extract
Field”. The regex is provided automatically based on your selection. The extracted
fields can be used for selection, projection, and aggregation.
Dashboards
You can create dashboards of useful metrics that you want to monitor closely. Any query
can be turned into a dashboard widget and summarized for any range in time. You can
check the performance of your system for the last five minutes, hour, or day. You can
view a breakdown of errors by hour and observe the trends in log events.
Security Considerations
IT decision makers, architects, administrators, and others who must familiarize

themselves with the security components of vRealize Log Insight must read the VMware
vRealize Log Insight Security Guide. For more information, you can visit the vRealize Log
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Insight Documentation found at https://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/log-insight-

pubs.html
The Security Guide contains concise references to the security features of vRealize Log
Insight. Topics include the product external interfaces, ports, authentication
mechanisms, and options for configuration and management of security features.
Dashboards Overview
Dashboards – Think of the dashboards page as an overview section. Dashboards

provide the ability to quickly visualize log data and determine potential issues within an
environment. Log Insight provides two different types of widgets inside a dashboard:
charts and queries. Charts are a visual representation of data and the most commonly
used widget. Queries are saved pieces of information that provide both a visual and
textual representation of data on the Interactive Analytics page, but they are listed only
by a defined name on the dashboards page. Query widgets are typically used when a
chart widget does not necessarily provide useful information.
Interactive Analytics – Allows administrators and engineers to perform searches using

plain language or REGEX strings and view log message detail to determine problem
areas and perform root cause analysis.
HOL-1811-02-SDC
Interactive Analytics Overview
The Interactive Analytics page allows administrators and engineers to drill down into log
messages, to determine problem areas, and to perform root cause analysis.
At the top of the page, just below the navigation bar, you will notice a section with a
black background. This section gives you a visual representation of your log data.
The chart in this section should look similar to the chart widgets that you saw on the
Dashboards page. By default, the overview chart is a bar chart that displays the count
of all events over time for the log messages seen over the last five minutes. Log Insight
refers to ingested data as events. The events visually represented on the overview chart
can be manipulated in a variety of ways, but most commonly are changed through the
use of functions and groupings.
There are many options available once you have created a custom query in the
Interactive Analytics page:
• Add current query to favorites - You can save your current query and time
range in Log Insight to view it later. Saved queries can only be loaded from the
Interactive Analytics page.
• Add current query to dashboard - You can save lists of search queries to your
custom dashboards by creating query list widgets.
• Export or share current query - In addition to saving a dashboard you can
also choose to save a query. NOTE: A saved query stores the time range in
addition to the query. This is different than how all other pieces of information are
saved in Log Insight (i.e. everything else you can save does not include the time
range.)

HOL-1811-02-SDC
• Create or Manage Alerts - When you find a query you care about you might
want to configure an alert when that query returns one or more results. Log
Insight allows for alerts to be sent via email or vCenter Operations.
• Manage Extracted Fields - This is important if you wish to find an extracted
field that does not appear on the current query page.
Content Packs Overview
Content packs provide a powerful way to extend Log Insight through pre-defined
knowledge about particular events. To browse to the Content Packs section, select the
three bars icon in the navigation bar and select Content Packs.
A content pack is made up of various components. These components can include:
• Dashboards – the dashboard groups (i.e. pages) that make up the selected
dashboard
• Queries
◦ Chart widgets
◦ Saved queries – located under Saved Searches
• Alerts – remember always disabled when exported

• Agent Groups - contain configuration for monitoring, parsing, and tagging event
to be sent to Log Insight
• Fields – labeled as Extracted Fields
Administration Overview
The administration section provides health information as well as allows for the
modification of configuration settings. All information displayed during the initial
configuration wizard of the product can be modified from the administration section.
There are other aspects of the administration section that are not configurable during
the initial configuration wizard such as where cluster members and agents can be
managed.
Configuring vRealize Log Insight
Now that we understand the purpose of vRealize Log Insight, the next step is to
configure our environment.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Exploring vSphere Log Events

In this section we will use Log Insight explore the logs of a vSphere environment. Often,
without a log analysis tools such as Log Insight, log errors are not viewed until
production workloads have degraded or failed and the business is impacted. With Log
Insight we can uncover log events and patterns that may ultimately lead to problems so
we can take action beforehand. In this section we will focus on log analysis and
dashboards, though you can use these same principles to create alerts and forward
them to vRealize Operations or via SMTP.
Launch Chrome
1. Open Google Chrome browser by double clicking on "Google Chrome" icon on

desktop

HOL-1811-02-SDC
View Logs in vRealize LogInsight
1. Click on "vRLogInsight" Favorite in the tool bar - Because we are running the
vCenter version of vRealize LogInsight, you will be prompted to trust the SSL Cert
as you can only change the SSL Cert for the web interface into LogInsight with
the vRealize Suite Version of LogInsight.
2. Click on "Advanced"
3. Then Click on "Proceed to log-01a.corp.loca (unsafe) - Don't worry, its safe

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Login to LogInsight
1. Username: admin
3. Click Login

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Log Insight Dashboard General Overview
If you have successfully connected to a vCenter, earlier in this module, the first screen
you will see is the General Overview dashboard.
1. If you are not already at this screen click the Dashboard tab.
2. This is the dashboard category tile; it tells you the source of the dashboards that
are available (to see a complete list of installed dashboards click the down arrow
next to the category title). Dashboards are either created within Log Insight or
come as part of a Content Pack. By default, the vSphere Content Pack comes pre-
installed. Dashboards from any other content pack that you install can be found
by clicking the arrow.
3. This section is a list of actual dashboards for the current category - The image
above shows the dashboards from the VMware - vSphere content Pack.
4. This section of the screen allows you to apply a date/time range filter to limit the
data you are viewing within the dashboard.
5. This section shows the filters which are available as part of this dashboard. The
filters allow you to quickly focus the dashboard on a specific object/item of
interest.
6. Widgets, the widget in Log Insight are configured to query the consolidated log
database and show specific areas of regular interest. In this case, the widget is
showing a graphical representation of all the vSphere log messages and when
they were generated. Widgets can be arranged in multiple ways and sizes.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Switch to Interactive Analytics
1. Click the Interactive Analytics tab
The Interactive Analytics Screen
The following describes the different sections of the Interactive Analytics Screen:
1. This area shows the graphical representation of the current Query, because we
have not specified anything as a query or filter all the events are being shown.
2. This section modifies how the graph displays the data.
3. With the Search box, you can enter anything here you would like to search for
within the logs. For example, this could be a host name, error message or
number.
4. With Data Range, Log Insight auto-correlates all log data, in this field you can
specify a specific time range you would like to search for log entries. By default,
the time range field is set to Latest 5 minutes of data. Be advised: large date

HOL-1811-02-SDC
ranges will take a longer time to return the complete set of data, but that data
will stream in as the query result is returned. In this lab we have only just
connected to the vCenter thus we have a limited time range where data is
available.
5. Events are the log entries which match the query and will be displayed here. The
key words (Fields) contained in each of the log messages will be called out in blue
below the log message. By default, Log Insight understands all the Syslog defined
fields. As part of content packs Fields are added which are specific to their
domain. In this case all the vSphere and Syslog Fields are available.
6. The Field List is all the defined fields from all the log messages which are part of
the result set from the query. You can click on any one of them and they will show
you a graphical representation of the number of log messages which are
associated to that field.
Searching Log Events
As you enter keyword searches inside the search box, Log Insight will provide auto
complete options as you type.
1. In the search field type vcsa* (remember to type in the asterisk), in this case we
are looking for all messages which are related to the vCenter vcsa-01a. In
English, simply type in what you are looking for and add an asterisk as the
wildcard.
2. Enter the data range, Latest 5 minutes of data.
3. Click the search Icon.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Event Types
Event Types are used when troubleshooting to quickly narrow down the resulting set of
log messages into pattern matched clusters. This capability allows you to quickly
eliminate irrelevant log messages.
1. Click the Event Types Tab. This will sort the result set of log messages by Event
type.
2. The Events column will provide the count of messages of the pattern matched
type
3. Click the x to remove this message type from the result set and automatically
creates a filter for that message type (you must hover the mouse over the area
for the "x" to display.
Note: The lab you are taking is a live dynamic environment. What you see will differ
from what is captured in the screenshot. Please choose any event in the window and
proceed to the next step.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Filters
After deleting the Event Type, the log messages are retained. They are only removed
from this query and the system automatically creates a filter or constraint excluding
that specific event type.
Creating a Filter
Now we will create a new filter to only include log messages based on the text api
invocations. This will show the number of api connections to your vCenter server.
1. Click Add Filter

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Set Filter Constraints
1. Set Filter to text.

2. Set the Operator to contains
3. Type API invocations
4. Click the search button (you may need to adjust the time field to "All Time")
5. At this point the result list will only show log messages related to the text API
invocations that are not event_type you filtered.
NOTE: Now we have narrowed down our results. Prior to adding filters there were over
a dozen different event types.
Field Extraction
Extracted fields provide a powerful way to construct queries in Log Insight. You can also
create your own custom extracted fields.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
1. Switch back to the Events tab.
2. Highlight the value next to "API invocations:". In the example above, its listed as 1,
but this number could be different.
3. A pop up window appears, select Extract field.
Fields configuration
A Fields configuration will appear on the right side of your screen. We now need to name
the extracted field, determine who can use the field, then save the field for use in the
future. You will use this extracted field later in this module when we integrate with
vRealize Operations Manager.
1. In the Field Name input box, type vmw_vc_api.
2. Under Available for drop down, you have the option to make this extracted field
available to just yourself or all users. Leave this as Me Only.
3. Click Save.
Extracted Field Complete

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Notice that we now have a new field called vmw_vc_api. We will leverage this later in
the module. For now, we will move to the next step.
Grouping Events
Now we want to group these events which add some additional data into our graph.
1. Select over time drop down
2. Place a check next to vmw_vc_auth_source (VMware - vSphere) and

vmw_vc_auth_user (VMware - vSphere)
3. Click Apply
Legend Created

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Notice that a legend has been created on the right side of the graph to display the IP
address and the username for who was connecting to the vCenter appliance.
Add Query to Dashboard
Now we will create a new dashboard called API Invocation Events based on our search
results.
1. Click Add to Dashboard.
Add Chart to Dashboard
1. Enter API Invocation Events in the Name field, replacing the default content
2. Ensure the Dashboard 1 is selected. You can change the dashboard you are
adding this query to any dashboard you have rights to modify or create a new
dashboard
3. Click Add

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Navigate to the Dashboards page
1. Click the Dashboards tab
Select My Dashboards
1. Click the drop down arrow for the dashboard list

2. Select My Dashboards

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Observe the Modified Dashboard
Observe that a new widget named API Invocation Events is now included with
Dashboard 1.
Section Complete
You now know how to use Log Insight to explore the logs of a vSphere environment. You
can leave the browser open for the next section.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Module 5 - Administration
Basics (60 Minutes)

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Introduction
• Lesson 1: Cluster Management - This lesson walks you through the creation of
various constructs that allow you to organize your virtual infrastructure.
• Lesson 2: Create and Edit a Virtual Machine - You will create a new virtual
machine and edit its properties
• Lesson 3: Migrate a Virtual Machine - This lesson introduces you to vMotion, a key
vSphere feature for reducing dowtime and optimizing your environment.
• Lesson 4: Working with Virtual Machine Snapshots - Here you will learn about VM
snapshots and practice creating and managing them.
• Lesson 5: Cloning Virtual Machines and Using Templates - Using templates can
greatly speed up the process of creating new VMs. You will learn how to leverage
these time saving tools by creating template and then using that template to
create a new VM.
• Lesson 6: Abstraction of Storage for More Efficient Management and Better
Control - You will recieve an overview of the different types of storage available in
vSphere and learn where to go in the vSphere client to get details around your
storage.
• Lesson 7: Manage Your Storage - vSphere with Operations Management includes
vRealize operations tools to assist with storage monitoring and other operational
tasks. Here you will learn about some of the dashboards that will let you monitor
your infrastructure's health.
• Lesson 8: Build and Manage your Virtual Infrastructure - Learn how far vSphere
will scale and get an introduction to the architecture than can get you there.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Cluster Management
A vSphere cluster is a construct that lets you aggregate compute resources. The
Clusters construct allows for features like vSphere High Availability (HA) and vSphere
Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). The cluster construct provides the ability to
manage a group of VMs and ESXi hosts to improve resource utilization. When you power
on a virtual machine that is part of a cluster, it can be given resources from anywhere in
the cluster, rather than being tied to a specific vSphere ESXi host. If an ESXi host fails,
the VM is restarted on another ESXi host within the cluster (assuming HA is configured).
If an ESXi host experiences contention, DRS provides the ability to vMotion the VM to
another ESXi host in the cluster that has available resources.
Video: Create vCenter Inventory (Datacenter, Cluster,

Hosts) for VMware vSphere (2:51)
The following video will show the basics to getting started creating your VMware
vCenter Server Inventory using the vSphere Web Client. Please note that these tasks
can also be completed using the vSphere Client, which is also known as the HTML5
Client.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Create and Edit a Virtual Machine

In this lesson, you will walk through creating a virtual machine and editing its settings.
Launch Google Chrome


HOL-1811-02-SDC
Login to the VMware vSphere Client
1. Click RegionA H5 from the Google Chrome bookmark.

2. Check the "Use Windows session autentication" checkbox
3. Click the "Login" button.
Note: All of the user credentials used in this lab are listed in the README.TXT file on
the desktop.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Create a Virtual Machine
There are several ways to create a new VM using the vSphere Client. We will be using
the Actions Menu under the VMs and Templates dropdown.
1. Click on the Menu dropdown at the top of the screen.

2. Select "VMs and Templates" from the drop-down menu.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Starting the Virtual Machine Wizard
1. Click on the "RegionA01" datacenter

2. In the "Actions" dropdown
3. Click the "New virtual machine..." option.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Virtual Machine Wizard - Select a creation type
1. Insure you are highlighted on "Create a virtual machine".

2. Click the Next button to advance to the next wizard option.
Note: There are many options for deploying a new virtual machine. For this lesson, we
will use the Create a New Virtual Machine option.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Virtual Machine Wizard - Select a name and folder
1. In the "Enter a name for the virtual machine" text box, type linux-Web-01a.
2. Insure "RegionA01" datacenter is selected.
3. Click the "Next" button to advance to the next wizard option.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Virtual Machine Wizard - Select a compute resource
1. Toggle the drop down triangle for "RegionA01-COMP01" cluster.

2. Select "esx-01a.corp.local".
3. Confirm Compatibility says "Compatibility checks succeeded".
Note: If you know Distributed Resource Scheduling {DRS} is enabled you can select
"RegionA01-COMP01" cluster and DRS will find the best location for the VM. For the
purposes of this lab we are showing the granular capability of being able to select a
specific ESXi host.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Virtual Machine Wizard - Select Storage
We need to select a datastore to place the new virtual machine.
1. Confirm the VM Storage Policy is set to Datastore Default.

2. Confirm RegionA01-ISCSI01-COMP01 datastore is highlighted.
3. Confirm Compatibility says Compatibility checks succeeded.
4. Click the Next button to advance to the next wizard option.
Note: If you have Storage Policy Based Management, you can enable and configure
storage policies for the VM. For the purposes of this demonstration, we are not enabling
this feature.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Virtual Machine Wizard - Select Compatibility
The version of virtual hardware that your virtual machine is built on will determine which
hosts it can run on. If you have older hosts in your environment, you would need to
select the corresponding version of virtual hardware. For our environment, our hosts are
ESXi version 6.5, so we can use the latest virtual hardware version 13.
1. Confirm "ESXi 6.5 and later" is selected from the drop-down menu.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Virtual Machine Wizard - Select a Guest OS
We need to identify which guest OS will be installed on the new virtual machine. This
will allow the wizard to provide appropriate default installation parameters
1. From the "Guest OS Family" drop-down select "Linux".

2. From the "Guest OS Version" drop-down, scroll to the bottom and select "Other
Linux (64-bit)".

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Virtual Machine Wizard - Customize Hardware
We can now verify the virtual hardware for our new virtual machine and make
modifications if necessary. We can easily add or modify hardware for the virtual machine
including CPU. Memory, or Hard drive space if necessary from the corresponding drop-
down boxes on this page.
1. Make sure "VM-RegionA01-vDS-COMP" is the selected network.

2. Ensure that the "Connect..." Checkbox is checked
3. We are not making any other changes, so click the "Next" button to advance to
the next wizard option.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Virtual Machine Wizard - Ready to complete
1. Review the settings for the new virtual machine.

2. Click the "Finish" button to start the creation task.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Power On linux-Web-01a
Once the virtual machine has been created, we can now power it on.
1. Toggle the drop down triangles for "RegionA01".

2. Click on "linux-Web-01a:.
3. Click on the "Actions" drop-down.
4. Expand the drop-down menu by hovering over "Power".
5. Click "Power On".

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Power Off linux-Web-01a
Let's power off our virtual machine now.
1. Right-Click on "linux-Web-01a".
2. Expand the drop-down menu by hovering over "Power".
3. Click "Power Off" from drop-down and select "Yes" in the pop-up box.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Delete linux-Web-01a
Let's delete linux-Web-01a.
1. Right-Click on "linux-Web-01a".
2. Click on "Delete from Disk" and select "Yes" when prompted from the pop-up box.
Note: Worth noting is there is "Remove from Inventory" and "Delete from Disk". We
selected "Delete from Disk" to remove the VM from inventory and also remove it from
the disk.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Video: Create VM, Install Guest OS and Install VMware

Tools (4:09)
We have just completed creating our virtual machine, but at this point, there is no
operating system installed. The Hands-on Lab Environment does not have sufficient
resources to allow us to complete the process of installing the guest OS and VMware
tools. The following video will show the remainder of the process. Note that the video
uses the vSphere Web Client. This will give you a chance to see what that client looks
like. All of these tasks can also be completed using the vSphere Client.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Edit the Settings of a Virtual Machine
Once we have created a virtual machine, we can change the hardware that is associated
with it, just like a physical machine.
1. Right-Click on "linux-micro-01a.corp.local".
2. Click "Edit Settings" to add additional physical resources to the virtual machine.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Add a New Device to the Virtual Machine
We now see the hardware associated with the VM. From this screen we can add
additional hardware to the VM. For this example, we will add a second network adapter.
1. Click the "Add New Device" drop-down list.

2. Click the "Network Adapter" option.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Configure the New Hardware
We have added the new network adapter, now we need to configure it.
1. Toggle the drop down triangle next to "New Network" to expand and view its
settings. At this time, you will also select which network to connect the NIC to as
well as what type of Adapter you would like to use. Notice that the MAC Address
is blank at this point. A new MAC address will be generated once this NIC is
added or we can specify (with some rules) our own MAC address.
2. Deselect the "Connect At Power On" checkbox.
3. Click the "OK" button to add the device to the VM. When you select "OK" a new
task to create the network adapter is started.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Prepare to Delete the New Hardware
We will can also delete resources from our virtual machine.
1. Right-Click on "linux-micro-01a".
2. Click "Edit Settings" from the drop-down menu.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Delete the Network Adapter

HOL-1811-02-SDC

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Now that we are done with this portion of the lab, let's remove the new network adapter
since we're not going to use it.
1. Hover or click on "Network Adapter 2".

2. Click on the "X" that appears on the right side of the window. The device details
will change and will show as "Device will be removed"

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Delete the Network Adapter - Confirm
1. Confirm "Network adapter 2" says "Device will be removed".

2. Click the "OK" button to commit the change.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Migrate a Virtual Machine

VMware vMotion enables the live migration of running virtual machines from one
physical server to another with no perceivable impact to the end user. vMotion is a key
technology for creating a dynamic, fully automated datacenter.
With vMotion you can:
• Perform scheduled maintenance without scheduled downtime by moving powered

on virtual machines from one host to another.
• Proactively migrate virtual machines away from failing or underperforming
servers.
• Automatically optimize and allocate entire pools of resources for optimal
hardware utilization and alignment with business priorities.
Migrate Powered-On Virtual Machine with vMotion
First we want to confirm where the Virtual Machine (VM) is running.
1. Confirm you are still highlighted on the VMs and Templates tab in the
navigation pane.
2. Click on "linux-micro-01a".
3. Click the "Summary" tab in the context pane.
4. Note that the IP address for the VM is 192.168.120.51
5. Confirm the "Host" the VM is running on. In this case, the VM is running on
"esx-01a.corp.local".

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Start the Migrate wizard
You can use the Migrate wizard to migrate a powered-on virtual machine from one host
to another using vMotion technology. To relocate the disks of a powered-on virtual
machine, the Migrate wizard uses Storage vMotion technology.
Before migrating a virtual machine with vMotion, you should ensure that your hosts and
virtual machines meet the requirements for migration with vMotion.
1. Locate "linux-micro-01a" and right-click on the virtual machine.

2. From the drop-down menus, select "Migrate...".

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Migration Wizard - Select the migration type
The Wizard will prompt you to select the type of migration you wish to perform:
compute resource, storage, or both. For our lab, we will migrate to the other host in
"Region01A"
1. Confirm the "Change compute resource only" radio button is selected.


HOL-1811-02-SDC
Migration Wizard - Select a compute resource
Currently, the virtual machine is running on host esx-01a.corp.local. Let's migrate it to

the other host in the cluster.
1. Confirm the "Hosts" tab is selected.

2. Select the host "esx-02a.corp.local" radio button.
3. Confirm "Compatibility" says "Compatibility checks succeeded".

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Migration Wizard - Select networks
Select the destination network from the dropdown box to provide network connectivity
for the virtual machine.
1. We are not changing the virtual switch, so confirm "ESXi-RegionA01-vDS-COMP" is

still selected in the drop-down menu.
2. Confirm "Compatibility" says "Compatibility checks succeeded".

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Migration Wizard - Select vMotion priority
1. Confirm the "Schedule vMotion with high priority (recommended)" radio button is
selected.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Migration Wizard - Ready to complete
1. Review the information in the wizard to make sure it is correct.

2. Launch a Command Prompt and type: ping 192.168.120.51 -t
3. Click the Finish button to start the migration.
The migration task is now complete. You will notice the VM is still reachable via the ping
that was executed.
The running virtual machine has been migrated to the other host in our cluster. You
have now accomplished moving a running workload between physical hardware without
interruption.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Working with Virtual Machine

Snapshots
Snapshots preserve the state and data of a virtual machine at the time you take the
snapshot. Snapshots are useful when you must revert to a previous virtual machine
state. You can also take multiple snapshots of a virtual machine to create restoration
points in a linear process. With multiple snapshots, you can save many positions to
accommodate many kinds of work processes. The Snapshot Manager in the vSphere
Web Client provides several operations for creating and managing virtual machine
snapshots and snapshot trees. These operations let you create snapshots, restore any
snapshot in the snapshot hierarchy, delete snapshots, and more.
A Virtual Machine snapshot preserves the following information:
• Virtual machine settings - The virtual machine directory, which includes disks that
were added or changed after you took the snapshot.
• Power state - The virtual machine can be powered on, powered off, or suspended.
• Disk state - State of all the virtual machine's virtual disks.
• Memory state (optional) - The contents of the virtual machine's memory.
In this lesson, you will create a Virtual Machine snapshot, make changes to the Virtual
Machine's hardware and configuration state, and then revert back to the original state
of the Virtual Machine by leveraging the vSphere Client Snapshot Manager.
Taking a Snapshot
The previous lesson left the vSphere Client open at the VMs and Templates navigation
pane. If you closed Google Chrome or the Web Client, navigate back to VMs and
Templates in the vSphere Client.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
To start the VM Snapshot Wizard:
1. Locate linux-micro-01a and right click on the VM

2. Hover over Snapshots
3. Select Take Snapshot in the drop-down menu
Snapshot Wizard - Take Snapshot
1. Type Snapshot-1 in the Name field

2. Type Snapshot prior to settings change. in the Description field. You should
always provide a meaningful description for the Snapshot
3. Click the OK button to complete the process
Note: The snapshot creation will be visible in the Recent Tasks pane.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Manage Snapshots
We can view the snapshot history of the virtual machine with the Snapshot.

3. Select Manage Snapshots in the drop-down menu

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Manage Snapshots - View VM Snapshot Details
1. Click on Snapshot-1. Note the operational state of the VM relative to the

snapshot timeline. We can see the current state of the virtual machine as well as
the snapshots that are present.
2. There are buttons to Delete All, Delete, and Revert To, which can be used to
manage snapshots.
3. There is also an Edit button to change the snapshot's name or description.
4. Click Done to exit this window.
Note: Snapshots are not a substitue for back-ups. If you "Revert" to an earlier snapshot,
then all changes since the snapshot are lost, so backing up data remains a critical
infrastructure process.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Reconfigure the Virtual Machines - Power Off VM
Let's power off our virtual machine now:
1. Right-Click on linux-micro-01a
2. Expand the drop-down menu by hovering over Power
3. Click Power Off from drop-down and select Yes in the pop-up box

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Reconfigure the Virtual Machines - Edit the Virtual

Machines Settings
In this step, we will adjust the Memory setting for the Virtual Machine:

2. Select Edit Settings from the drop-down menu

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Reconfigure the Virtual Machines - Change the CPU/

Memory Settings
1. Select the drop-down menu for the CPU Settings and select "2"
2. Select the drop-down menu for Memory and select "512" (MB)
3. Click the OK button to save the changes.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Manage Snapshots - Revert Virtual Machine Settings
In this step, you will revert the VM's CPU/Memory configuration back to the original state
using the latest snapshot
1. Select linux-micro-01a in the navigation pane, if it is not already highlighted

2. Click on the Actions drop-down
4. Click Revert to Latest Snapshot
Note: This could also be completed by selecting "Manage Snapshots". That method
provides greater control when you have multiple snapshots.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Manage Snapshots - Confirm Revert Virtual Machine

2. Select Edit Settings from the drop-down menu
Note: If there had been any changes to data on the disk, this would be lost as well.
Snapshots have many use-cases, but are not a substitue for backups.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Confirm the VM state
Reverting to the Snapshot will take the VM back to the state it was in before we added
the additional CPU/Memory. To confirm:
1. Confirm the CPU has been reset to 1 CPU from 2 CPUs

2. It may be difficult to see, but the Memory has been reset to 64 MB from 512 MB
3. Click the OK button to close the window
Note: You may see that Network adapter 2 that was deleted in an earlier lesson has re-
appeared. This will be a rare circumstance in the lab when the VM times out on deleting
the network adapter. If this has happened in your lab, just ignore this and continue on
with the lessons.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Lab Clean-up - Delete Snapshots

3. Select Manage Snapshots in the drop-down menu
Lab Clean-up - Delete Snapshots (Continued)

HOL-1811-02-SDC
1. Click the Delete All button, and click OK on the pop up that appears.
2. Click Done.
Video: Virtual Machine Snapshots for VMware vSphere

(2:32)
For our lab, the snapshot was used to revert our virtual machine to a previous hardware
state. A typical use case can be to take a snapshot of a virtual machine before the
installation of a software package. If something goes wrong, you can revert to a
previous state and retry the installation. The following video will provide additional
insight into the value of virtual machine snapshots. Note that the video uses the
vSphere Web Client. This will give you a chance to see what that client looks like. All of
these tasks can also be completed using the vSphere Client.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Cloning Virtual Machines and Using

Templates
VMware provides several ways to provision vSphere virtual machines. One method is to
create a single virtual machine, install an operating system on it and then use that
virtual machine as a base image from which to clone other virtual machines. Cloning a
virtual machine can save time if you are deploying many similar virtual machines. You
can create, configure, and install software based on a single virtual machine. You can
clone it multiple times, rather than creating and configuring each virtual machine
individually.
Another provisioning method is to clone a virtual machine to a template. A template is a

master copy of a virtual machine that you can use to create and provision virtual
machines. Creating a template can be useful when you need to deploy multiple virtual
machines from a single baseline, but want to customize each system independently of
the next. A common value proposition for using templates is to save time. If you have a
virtual machine that you will clone frequently, make that virtual machine a template and
deploy your virtual machines from that template.
In this lesson, you will clone an existing Virtual Machine to a Template and deploy a new
Virtual Machine from that Template.
Clone Virtual Machine to Template

HOL-1811-02-SDC
You should still be on the VMs and Templates tab in the navigation pane.
1. Locate linux-micro-01a and right-click on the VM.

2. Hover over Clone
3. Select Clone to Template
Clone Virtual Machine to Template Wizard - Select a Name

and Folder
1. Type Tiny Linux Template In the "Enter a name for the template" field
2. Confirm the location is RegionA01
3. Click the Next button to advance to the next option

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Clone Virtual Machine to Template Wizard - Select a

compute resource
1. Toggle the drop down triangles for RegionA01 and RegionA01-COMP01

2. Click on esx-02a.corp.local
3. Confirm "Compatibility" says "Compatibility checks succeeded."

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Clone Virtual Machine to Template Wizard - Select Storage
1. Click the "Select virtual disk format:" drop-down and select Thin Provision (This
is a lab environment, so Thick Provisioned will utilize unnecessary space)
2. There is only one datastore in the lab, so RegionA01-ISCSI01-COMP01 will
already be highlighted
3. Confirm "Compatibility" says "Compatibility checks succeeded."
Note: The datastore with the most free space is automatically chosen.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Clone Virtual Machine to Template Wizard - Ready to

Complete
1. Review the VM Template Settings

2. Click the Finish button to start the clone process

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Monitor Task Progress / Confirm Template creation
1. If your Recent Tasks pane is minimized, you can open it and view the status
2. You can also confirm by viewing the navigation pane and locating the Tiny Linux
Template Template object

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Deploy a Virtual Machine from a Template
1. Right Click the Template Tiny Linux Template

2. Click on "New VM from This Template..."

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Deploy from Template Wizard - Select a name and folder
1. Type TinyLinux-VM In the "Enter a name for the virtual machine" field
2. Confirm the location is RegionA01

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Deploy from Template Wizard - Select a compute resource
1. Toggle the drop down triangles for "RegionA01" and "RegionA01-COMP01"

2. Click on esx-02a.corp.local
3. Confirm "Compatibility" says Compatibility checks succeeded

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Deploy from Template Wizard - Select Storage
1. Click the "Select virtual disk format:" drop-down and select Thin Provision (This
is a lab environment, so Thick Provisioned will utilize unnecessary space)
2. There is only one datastore in the lab, so RegionA01-ISCSI01-COMP01 will
already be highlighted
3. Confirm "Compatibility" says Compatibility checks succeeded
Note: The datastore with the most free space is automatically chosen.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Deploy from Template Wizard - Select clone Options
1. Check the Power on virtual machine after creation checkbox

Note: In order to manage the time to complete this module, the template OS installed
will not be customized.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Deploy from Template Wizard - Ready to Complete
1. Review the Deploy From Template Settings.

2. Click the Finish button to start the "Deploy from Template" process

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Monitor the Task Progress
1. Note the new VM TinyLinux-VM in the navigation Pane
Cleanup - Power Off TinyLinux-VM
Let's power off our virtual machine now:
1. Right-Click on TinyLinux-VM
2. Expand the drop-down menu by hovering over Power
3. Click Power Off from drop-down and select Yes in the pop-up box

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Cleanup - Delete TinyLInux-VM
Let's delete this Virtual machine from our environment:
1. Right-click on TinyLinux-VM
2. Click Delete from Disk from the drop-down menu and select the Yes button
when prompted from the pop-up box

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Video: Virtual Machine Cloning and Templates for VMware

vSphere (4:04)
For additional features of cloning and templates for vSphere, please watch the following
video. Note that the video uses the vSphere Web Client. This will give you a chance to
see what that client looks like. All of these tasks can also be completed using the
vSphere Client.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Abstraction of Storage for More

Efficient Management and Better
Control
vSphere Storage Overview
The following lesson provides an overview of the different types of storage available in
vSphere. The vSphere Hypervisor, ESXi, provides host-level storage virtualization, which
logically abstracts the physical storage layer from virtual machines.
A vSphere virtual machine uses a virtual disk to store its operating system, program
files, and other data associated with its activities. A virtual disk is a large physical file, or
a set of files, that can be copied, moved, archived, and backed up as easily as any other
file. You can configure virtual machines with multiple virtual disks.
To access virtual disks, a virtual machine uses virtual SCSI controllers. These virtual
controllers include BusLogic Parallel, LSI Logic Parallel, LSI Logic SAS, and VMware
Paravirtual. These controllers are the only types of SCSI controllers that a virtual
machine can see and access.
Each virtual disk resides on a vSphere Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) datastore or
an NFS-based datastore that are deployed on physical storage. From the standpoint of
the virtual machine, each virtual disk appears as if it were a SCSI drive connected to a
SCSI controller. Whether the actual physical storage device is being accessed through
parallel SCSI, iSCSI, network, Fibre Channel, or FCoE adapters on the host is transparent
to the guest operating system and to applications running on the virtual machine.
The vSphere storage management process starts with storage space that your storage
administrator allocates on different storage systems prior to vSphere ESXi assignment.
vSphere supports two types of storage - Local and Networked. Both are detailed in the
following pages.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Local Storage
The illustration depicts virtual machines using Local VMFS storage directly attached to a
single ESXi host.
Local storage can be internal hard disks located inside your ESXi host, or it can be
external storage systems located outside and connected to the host directly through
protocols such as SAS or SATA.
Networked Storage
The illustration depicts virtual machines using networked VMFS storage presented to
multiple ESXi hosts.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Networked storage consists of external storage systems that your ESXi host uses to
store virtual machine files remotely. Typically, the host accesses these systems over a
high-speed storage network. Networked storage devices are typically shared. Datastores
on networked storage devices can be accessed by multiple hosts concurrently, and as a
result, enable additional vSphere technologies such as High Availability host clustering,
Distributed Resource Scheduling, vMotion and Virtual Machines configured with Fault
Tolerance. ESXi supports several networked storage technologies - Fiber Channel, iSCSI,
NFS, and Shared SAS.
Viewing a Datastores Configuration
This lab will show you where you can examine details about the storage used by your
virtual infrastructure.

Bar

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Login to the VMware vSphere Client
1. Click "RegionA H5" from the Google Chrome bookmark.

2. Check the "Use Windows session authentication" Checkbox
3. Click the "Login" button.
the desktop.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Navigate to Storage
1. Select "Storage" from the Menu drop-down.
Storage - Summary
You will now see the datastores that are provisioned in your environment.
1. Toggle the drop down triangles for "vcsa-01a.corp.local" and "RegionA01".

2. Select the "RegionA01-ISCSI01-COMP01" datastore.
3. Click on the "Summary" tab for additional information about the datastore.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
4. Toggle the drop down triangle for the "Details" sub-pane. This pane provides the
Location; Type; and the number Hosts connected, Virtual Machines risiding on the
storage and templates residing on the storage.
Note: There is also a handy image showing you the used and free capacity fo the
particular datastore.
Storage - VMs
1. Click on the "VMs" tab.

2. Click the "Virtual Machines" sub-tab. You now have a list of the three virtual
machines mentioned in the "Summary" tab.
3. This includes a summary of all the virtual machines running on the highlighted
datastore.
Note: You can also click on the "VM Templates in Folders" sub-tab to see the two
templates. Your lab may only have one template, if you did not complete the lesson
that generated the second template.
Common Virtualized Storage terms
This lesson will wrap up by providing an overview of a few common terms:
• Virtual Machine Disks

• Storage vMotion
• vSphere Replication
• Virtual Volumes

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Virtual Machine Disks
The illustration depicts virtual machines using different types of virtual disk formats
against a shared VMFS Datastore.
When you perform certain virtual machine management operations, such as creating a
virtual disk, cloning a virtual machine to a template, or migrating a virtual machine, you
can specify a provisioning policy for the virtual disk file format. There are three types of
virtual disk formats:
Thin Provision
Use this format to save storage space. For the thin disk, you provision as much
datastore space as the disk would require based on the value that you enter for the disk
size. However, the thin disk starts small. When deployed, it only uses as much
datastore space as the disk needs for its initial operations. It then expands on the
physical disk as more space is required. Thin Provisioned disks can be converted to
thick assuming there is sufficient physical storage availalbe.
Thick Provision Lazy Zeroed
Creates a virtual disk in a default thick format. Space required for the virtual disk is
allocated when the virtual disk is created. Data remaining on the physical device is not
erased during creation, but is zeroed out on demand at a later time on first write from
the virtual machine. Using the thick-provision, lazy-zeroed format does not zero out or

HOL-1811-02-SDC
eliminate the possibility of recovering deleted files or restoring old data that might be
present on this allocated space. You cannot convert a thick-provisioned, lazy-zeroed disk
to a thin disk, however you can use the migrate wizard to perform this function.
Thick Provision Eager Zeroed
A type of thick virtual disk that supports clustering features such as Fault Tolerance.
Space required for the virtual disk is allocated at creation time. In contrast to the thick
provision, lazy-zeroed format, the data remaining on the physical device is zeroed out
when the virtual disk is created. In general, it takes much longer to create disks in this
format than to create other types of disks. For disk write intensive and disk latency
sensitive applications, the disks should be prepared as Thick Provision Eager Zeroed to
maximize write performance.
Storage vMotion
Planned downtime typically accounts for over 80% of datacenter downtime. Hardware
maintenance, server migration, and firmware updates all require downtime for physical
servers. To minimize the impact of this downtime, organizations are forced to delay
maintenance until inconvenient and difficult-to-schedule downtime windows.
The vMotion. and Storage vMotion functionality in vSphere makes it possible for
organizations to reduce planned downtime because workloads in a VMware environment
can be dynamically moved to different physical servers or to different underlying
storage without service interruption. Administrators can perform faster and completely
transparent maintenance operations, without being forced to schedule inconvenient
maintenance windows. With vSphere vMotion and Storage vMotion, organizations can:
• Eliminate downtime for common maintenance operations.

• Eliminate planned maintenance windows.
• Perform maintenance at any time without disrupting users and services.
Note: There are not two datastores in this lab to demonstrate a storage vMotion,
although storage vMotion uses the same "Migrate" wizard as vMotion.
Datastore Cluster
A vSphere Datastore Cluster balances I/O and storage capacity across a group of
vSphere datastores. Depending on the level of automation desired, Storage Dynamic
Resource Scheduler will place and migrate virtual machines in order to balance out
datastore utilization across the Datastore Cluster.
vSphere Replication
VMware vSphere Replication, the VMware proprietary replication engine, provides data
protection and disaster recovery for the vSphere platform by replicating virtual machine

HOL-1811-02-SDC
disks within the same site and across sites. It is tightly integrated with vSphere and is
managed using the vSphere Web Client. It is included with vSphere Essentials Plus Kit
and higher editions of vSphere. Multiple points in time recovery can be enabled to
provide as many as 24 recovery points for a replicated virtual machine. vSphere
Replication is used as a standalone solution and as a replication engine for VMware
vCenter Site Recovery Manager and VMware vCloud Air Disaster Recovery.
For more on VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager, take the "HOL-1805-01-SDC
Site Recovery Manager Data Center Migration and Disaster Recovery" lab.
The recovery point objective (RPO) can be set on a per–virtual machine basis and can
range from 5 minutes to 24 hours. After initial synchronization between the source and
the target locations, only changes to the virtual machines are replicated, enabling
vSphere Replication to minimize network bandwidth consumption. New to vSphere
Replication in vSphere 6.5 to further improve efficiency is the option to compress
replicated data as it is sent across the network. It is now possible to easily isolate
network traffic associated with vSphere Replication. This enables vSphere
administrators to control bandwidth by configuring more than one network interface
card in a vSphere Replication virtual appliance and by using vSphere Network I/O
Control to separate network traffic. The result is improved performance and security.
Enhancements have been made to the way vSphere Replication performs a full
synchronization. Previous versions of vSphere Replication requested and compared
remote checksums with local checksums to determine the regions of a virtual disk that
had to be replicated. With some storage platforms and vSphere 6.5, vSphere Replication
can query vSphere for storage allocation information, to reduce the amount of time and
network bandwidth required to perform a full synchronization.
vSphere Replication is fully compatible with VMware vSphere Storage vMotion at both
the source and target locations. Prior to vSphere 6.0, moving a replica at the target
location required vSphere Replication to perform a full synchronization. With vSphere
6.0, migrating a replica with vSphere Storage vMotion no longer requires this. That
makes it much easier to balance storage utilization with vSphere Storage vMotion and
VMware vSphere Storage DRS while avoiding RPO violations. Improvements have also
been made to VMware Tools for Linux virtual machines. With some Linux OSs, VMware
Tools features the ability to quiesce the guest OS during replication and backup
operations. vSphere Replication can utilize this new functionality to enable file
system–consistent recovery of Linux virtual machines.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Virtual Volumes
Virtual Volumes (VVOL) is a new integration and management framework that virtualizes
SAN/NAS arrays, enabling a more efficient operational model that is optimized for
virtualized environments and is centered on the application instead of the storage
infrastructure. Currently, storage management is generally LUN-centric, or volume-
centric. With VVOL's, we can manage our storage based on the requirements of the
application.
Virtual Volumes simplifies operations through policy-driven automation that enables

more agile storage consumption for VMs and dynamic adjustments in real time. It
simplifies the delivery of storage service levels to individual applications by providing
finer control of hardware resources and native array-based data services that can be
instantiated with per VM granularity.
Some of the key features are:
• Simplifies Storage Operations - Virtual Volumes simplifies storage operations

by automating manual tasks and eliminating operational dependencies between
the VI Admin and the Storage Admin that have traditionally added complexity.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Provisioning is faster and change management is simpler as the new operational

model is built upon policy-driven automation.
• Simplifies the Delivery of Storage Service Levels - Virtual Volumes
simplifies the delivery of storage service levels to applications by providing
administrators with finer control of storage resources and data services at the VM
level that can be dynamically instantiated and controlled in real-time.
• Improves Resource Utilization - Virtual Volumes improves resource utilization
by enabling more flexible consumption of storage resources, when needed and
with greater granularity. The precise consumption of storage resources eliminates
overprovisioning.
For more on Virtual Volumes (VVOL), take the "HOL-1827-01-HCL VMware Storage
Virtual Volumes and Storage Policy Based Management" lab.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Managing Your Storage

vRealize Operations Manager has various tools that will assist you in managing your
storage. Alerts that will identify when there are problems in the environment,
dashboards that will allow you to monitor your environment proactively, and out of the
box reports that can be fully customized.

Bar


HOL-1811-02-SDC
1. Click the "vROps" bookmark in Google Chrome. Insure you are connecting to
"vrops-01a.corp.local".
2. In sure the "Authentication Source:" is "Local Users".
3. Type admin in the User name field.
4. Type VMware1! in the Password field.
5. Click the "Log in" button.
the desktop.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Navigate to Dashboards
1. Click on the Home drop down menu.

2. Click on Dashboards.
1. Click on the All Dashboard dropdown menu

2. Check the Operations checkbox

HOL-1811-02-SDC
vSphere Datastores Dashboard
vRealize Operations has numerous dashboards that we can use to help manage our
infrastructure, including our storage.
1. Under the Dashboards list, click on Datastore Usage Overview.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
vSphere Datastores Dashboard - Exploring content
When we open the vSphere Datastore Dashboard, we will see a view of the Datastore
data via a heatmap dashboard widget. Dashboards remain a very powerful way to
depict objects/metrics in your environment and illustrate the interaction between
different objects/metrics.
The Datastore Heatmaps widget depicts "Commands per Second" and "Total Latency"
organized by Virtual Machine. The heat map is a powerful two dimensional view. The
size of the block represents the first metric (Commands per Second). The color
represents the second metric (Total Latency). We can quickly see that while some VMs
do have more disk activity, the latency for all the VMs fairly low. In the lab environment
we are all good and there is no need to do any form of redistribution.
1. It might not look like there is much value in just looking at a heatmap, because
there is no visible data displayed. To see the data, hover or click on a box which
represents a specific Virtual Machine. In the screen capture, Virtual Machine
db-01a was selected and we get back information about the metrics displayed
along with the cluster compute resource associated with this VM.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
2. We could easily click the Show Sparkline link to drill down even further. Because
this is a lab environment, the sparklines will not have any data to show as the
VMs will not have been running long enough. In an environment where vROPs has
had the chance to collect data for a while, these sparklines will populate with a
historical line graph.
Operations Overview
1. Under Dashboards click on Operations Overview

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Operations Overview - Widget Types
This Dashboard has a number of different types of widgets including:
1. Scoreboard which shows the current value for each metric of an object you select
2. Object List - In this case this widget is being used to populate some of the other
widgets. We will discuss this further in the next step.
3. Health Chart - shows the Health, Risk Efficiency, or custom metric for a selected
object or objects
4. Alert Volume - A trend report of alerts generated for an object
5. Top-N widgets - Display the top-n (in this case 15) results from analysis of an
object or objects.
There are more than 45 widget types to select from when building custom dashboards.
Custom dashboards do require Advanced or Enterprise versions of vRealize Operations.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Operations Overview - Exploring Widget Interaction
At times, interacting with one widget will effect the output of another widget. In this
case:
1. The Select a Datacenter Object List widget would allow to change the focus of
the other widgets on this dashboard if you had more than one datacenter.
Selecting another datacenter in the Select a Datacenter (DC) widget would
change the:
2. Cumulative Up-TIme of all Clusters (in selected DC)
3. Alert Volume (in selected DC)

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Native vSAN Management
vSAN Management is nateively integrated with the latest versions of vRealize

Operations Manager.
1. The lab environment does not use vSAN, however clicking on the vSAN
Operations Overview or the Optimize vSAN deployments would provide you
important information to help you manage any vSAN clusters that are in use.
For additional visibility into your storage environment, the vRealize Operations
Management Pack for Storage Devices (MPSD) can be installed on any Advanced or
Enterprise edition of vRealize Operations Manager. The Management Pack can connect
to any storage device that has a VASA provider, and SAN/NAS Switches from Brocade or
Cisco using SMI-S. Performance Data is collected from Host HBA’s, NIC, VMs, and SAN/
NAS switches.
MPSD provides visibility into your storage environment. Using Common Protocols to
collect performance and health data from the storage devices. Pre-defined dashboards
allow you to follow the path from a VM to the storage volume and identify any problem
that may exist along that path. There is no visibility beyond the storage path unless
additional vendor hardware storage management packs are installed and these again
would require Advanced or Enteprise editions of vRealize Operations Manager. Here are
some of the benefits of MPSD:
• End to End view of the data path through the SAN and NAS; from VM to Storage
Volume
• Support for both NFS/iSCSI and FC/FCoE protocols
• Access to Storage devices leveraging standardized protocols; CIM, SMI-S, & VASA
• Ready to use dashboards for Health and Performance
• Analytics for common APD and PDL storage conditions
Note: Management Packs allow for extensibility of vRealize Operations Manager.

Management Packs dealing with infrastructure components require Advanced or

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Enterprise editions of vROps. There are also application level management packs for
SQL, Oracle and others. Application level management packs require the Enterprise
edition of vROPs.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Build and Manage your Virtual

Infrastructure - Scale Out
vSphere with Operations Manager is suitable for small environment and scales up to
meet the demands of large enterprises. With a scale up and scale out architecture vSOM
can grow with your environment. The flexible architecture allows for geographical
deployments.
vCenter Server - Configuration Maximums
• vCenter Server - architected to provide larger than ever scale for the biggest
virtual environments:
◦ Hosts per vCenter Server System: 2,000
◦ Powered-on Virtual Machines per vCenter Server System: 25,000
◦ Hosts per Cluster: 64
◦ Virtual Machines per Cluster: 8,000
Note: Click on the link for a complete list of current vSphere v6 Configuration
Maximums. Guidance for future releases are provided at GA (General Availaibity).
vRealize Operations - Architecture Overview Video (3:30)

HOL-1811-02-SDC
vRealize Operations Manager - Configuration Maximums
vRealize Operations (vROps) provides a scalable cluster/node architecture that can

scale to the largest of environments.
• Maximum 120,000 Objects - 10 times better than 5.8.x!!! (12,000 objects in

5.8.x)
• Maximum 16 node cluster (1 master and 15 data nodes). With HA it would be 1
master, 1 replica master and up to 14 data nodes.
• HA requires DOUBLE the nodes, but there is still a 16 node maximum. HA
reduces maximum objects to 60,000.
• Maximum 50 Certified Remote Collectors per cluster.
• Maximum 30 Adapter Instances per cluster.
• Maximum 200 certified concurrent users.
Note: Configuration maximums apply to vRealize Operations v6.1 and v6.2. Guidance
for future releases are provided at GA (General Availaibity).
vRealize Operations - Scalability Video (3:03)

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Conclusion
This module walked you through many of the daily management tasks that are
performed by virtualization administrators world wide on a daily basis. You learned
various ways to create, edit, and manage Virtual Machines. You also learned about the
various types of storage that Virtual Machines can leverage, and the tools that vSphere
with Operations Management provides to help you monitor that storage. Finally you
learned about vSphere's scalability.
We hope you have enjoyed taking this module and have a better understanding of using
vSphere 6.5. Be sure to take the survey at the end.
If you are looking for additional information on administering and managing vSphere
with Operations Management, try one of these:
your pace.
Topics to learn how to perform additional, advanced administration tasks,
including management of storage, networking and the Content Library.


HOL-1811-02-SDC

Insight, VMware's log management and analysis tool..
How to End Lab

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Module 6 - Upgrading
vCenter (30 Minutes)

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Introduction
• Lesson 1: Upgrading vCenter - This lesson will outline the tasks and methods to
upgrade an existing vSphere environment to vSphere 6.5.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Upgrading vCenter
vSphere provides many options for upgrading your vSphere deployment. For a
successful vSphere upgrade, you must understand the upgrade options, the
configuration details that impact the upgrade process, and the sequence of tasks. This
module will discuss how to upgrade vCenter Server to the latest version using the
standard upgrade workflows. Due the time required to upgrade an environment, we will
only be discussing each upgrade path.
Overview of the vCenter Server Upgrade Process
VMware provides many options to upgrade to vCenter Server 6.5.
You can upgrade or migrate your vCenter Server version 5.5 or version 6.0 installation
to version 6.5 using the method that best addresses your deployment goals and
requirements. You will not be able to upgrade directly to vCenter Server 6.5 from
vCenter Server 5.1 or earlier. You must first upgrade to vCenter Server version 5.5 or
6.0.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
vCenter Server High-level Upgrade Tasks
Select your upgrade:
• Upgrade existing vCenter Server Appliance

• Upgrade existing vCenter Server on Windows
• Migrate vCenter Server on Windows to vCenter Server Appliance (This will be
covered in "Module 7 - vCenter Server Appliance Migration")

HOL-1811-02-SDC
vCenter Server Supported Upgrade Methods
If you plan to run vCenter on a Physical Server on Windows, verify your hardware meets
the necessary to requirements to run vCenter.
Graphical User Interface (GUI) Installer
The GUI installer provides a two-step upgrade method using OVF and the vCenter Server
Appliance Management GUI. The first step deploys an unconfigured Platform Services
Controller appliance or vCenter Server Appliance as an OVF file. The second step uses
the vCenter Server Appliance Management GUI to configure the new appliance using the
source deployment data.
Command Line Interface (CLI) Installer
The CLI installer provides advanced users with a CLI method for upgrading the vCenter
Server Appliance or migrating vCenter Server on Windows to an appliance. You can
upgrade or migrate to vCenter Server Appliance configurations using customized CLI
templates.
Migration Assistant Interface for Migrating vCenter Server

(5.5 or 6.0) on Windows to vCenter Server Appliance 6.5
When you migrate a legacy vCenter Single Sign-On, Platform Services Controller, or
vCenter Server on Windows to an appliance using the Migration Assistant interface. You
can use either the GUI method or the CLI method to migrate the legacy Windows
installation data to a target appliance (This will be covered in "Module 3 - vCenter
Server Appliance Migration").
vCenter Server Components and Services
vCenter Server 6.5 provides a centralized platform for management, operation, resource
provisioning, and performance evaluation of virtual machines and hosts.
When you upgrade to vCenter Server with an embedded Platform Services Controller, or
to vCenter Server Appliance with an embedded Platform Services Controller, vCenter
Server, the vCenter Server components, and the services included in the Platform
Services Controller are deployed on the same system.
When you upgrade to vCenter Server with an external Platform Services Controller, or
deploy the vCenter Server Appliance with an external Platform Services Controller,
vCenter Server and the vCenter Server components are deployed on one system, and
the services included in the Platform Services Controller are deployed on another
system.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
The following components are included in the vCenter Server and vCenter Server
Appliance installations:
• The VMware Platform Services Controller group of infrastructure services contains

vCenter Single Sign-On, License service, Lookup Service, and VMware Certificate
Authority.
• The vCenter Server group of services contains vCenter Server, vSphere Web
Client, vSphere Auto Deploy, and vSphere ESXi Dump Collector. vCenter Server
for Windows also contains the VMware vSphere Syslog Collector, while the
vCenter Server Appliance uses the built-in Rsyslog service of the Linux OS.
vCenter Server Upgrade Compatibility
The upgrade to vCenter Server affects other software components of the data center.
vCenter Server 6.5 can manage ESXi version 5.5 or 6.0 hosts in the same cluster with
the next version ESXi. The next major release of vCenter Server cannot manage ESXi
5.1 or earlier hosts.
As mentioned at the beginning of this module, you cannot upgrade to vCenter Server
6.5 from vCenter Server 5.1 or earlier. You must first upgrade to vCenter Server version
5.5 or 6.0.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Conclusion
This module introduced you to some of the considerations you will have when
upgrading from a previous version of vSphere to vSphere 6.5
If you are looking for additional information on upgrading for vSphere 6.5, try one of
these:
• You may also explore VMware 6.5 Feature Walk through which will step you
your pace.
Topics for further information on some of the topics we considered in this module.
Specifically consider Module 5 which discusses how to use Autodeploy to perform
this upgrade.


HOL-1811-02-SDC

How to End Lab

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Module 7 - vCenter Server

Appliance Migration (30
Minutes)

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Introduction
• Lesson 1: Hands-on Labs Interactive Simulation: vCenter Server Appliance

Migration - This simulation will walk you through using the built-in migration
process to upgrade and migrate various vSphere with Operations Management
components to 6.5.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Hands-on Labs Interactive Simulation:

vCenter Server Appliance Migration
The purpose of this module is to demonstrate how to upgrade and migrate a “Windows
vCenter Server 5.5” with a local “SQL Server Database” connected to an external
“Windows SSO Server” to the new “vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA)” with a “vPostgres
Embedded Database” connected to an external “Platform Services Controller (PSC)”.
You can accomplish this by using the Migration Assistant for vSphere 6.5, which is
initiated separately on the source Windows vCenter Server and Windows Single Sign-On
Server respectfully.
Please note: VMware recently announced vCenter Server Migration Tool: vSphere
6.0 Update 2m. This is a separate release from the Migration Assistant for
vSphere 6.5 we are discussing in this module. During 2013, VMware released the VCS
to VCVA Converter Fling based on a winning idea from the annual Fling contest. The VCS
to VCVA Converter Fling allowed customers to migrate their entire Windows vCenter
Server 5.5 which included configuration, inventory, historical data, and identity to a
vCenter Server Appliance 5.5. While the VCS to VCVA Converter Fling was able to
address our needs for an end to end migration tool, it was released with a subset of
features. This allowed for quicker availability of the Fling and customer
feedback. VMware took its learning from the VCS to VCVA Converter Fling improving and
adding more features, resulting in vSphere 6.0 Update 2m.
A key difference between these two releases is vSphere Update Manager 5.5 /
6.0 is able to be upgraded and migrated to vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 using
the Migration Assistant for vSphere 6.5. This is because vSphere Update
Manager will run on the vCenter Server Appliance version 6.5.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Migration Process Overview
Migrating a Windows vCenter with an external SSO to the new vCenter Server Appliance
with an external Platform Services Controller is a 2-step process. If you choose to, the
process will enable you to migrate everything (Configuration, events, tasks, and
performance metrics) to the new vCenter Server Appliance. This is optional and may
impact migration's length of time to complete.
Prior to this tool, a manual migration like this would result in a new Universal Unique
Identifier (UUID) and new Managed Object Reference (MoRef) ID, thus causing
challenges for external applications.
This vCenter Server Appliance migration process consists of two stages (for
each source):
• Stage 1: Deploy a fresh appliance / OVF
• Stage 2: Setting up the appliance server
This simulation will go through each stage of the vCenter Server Appliance
Migration which is too time-consuming and resource intensive to do live in the
lab environment.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
1. Click here to open the interactive simulation. It will open in a new browser window or
tab.
2. When finished, click the "Return to the lab" link or close the window to continue with
this lab.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Conclusion
In this module you were able to step through the migration process to move
to vSphere 6.5. The built in migration tool greatly simplifies this process as
compared to previous versions of vSphere.
If you are looking for additional information on vCenter Server Appliance Migration, try
one of these:
your pace.


HOL-1811-02-SDC

How to End Lab

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Module 8 - High
Availability and Business
Continuity (60 Minutes)

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Introduction
• Lesson 1: vCenter Server High Availability Overview - Introduces you to the new
High Availability feature for the vCenter Server Appliance.
• Lesson 2: Hands-on Labs Interactive Simulation: vCenter HA - You will step
through configuring High Availability for the vCenter Server Appliance
• Lesson 3: Demonstrate resilience to network component failures - Demonstrates
how vSphere can use virtual networking constructs to protect against network
component failures.
• Lesson 4: vSphere Replication - Introduces vSphere Replication and lets you know
where to go for more information.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
vCenter Server High Availability

Overview
The next release of vCenter introduces a native option to protect a vCenter Server
deployment from hardware failures
High availability (HA) involves setting up a vCenter Server passive node and a witness
node in addition to the vCenter Server active node that you are trying to protect.
vCenter Server HA provides a much improved HA experience. This lab will explain
vCenter Server HA
vCenter Server High Availability

HOL-1811-02-SDC
The high availability setup involves setting up a vCenter Server passive node and a
Witness node in addition to the vCenter Server active node that you are trying to
protect. The three nodes form the vCenter Server HA cluster.
Basic and Advanced Workflows for vCenter Server HA
There are two workflows that can deploy vCenter server HA – Basic & Advanced. The
Basic workflow can be used in most circumstances such as when a vCenter Server is
self-managed (i.e. the vCenter Server is managing the hosts that itself is running on) or
if it is running under another management vCenter Server that is part of the same SSO
Domain. As its name suggests, this workflow is very simple and creates the Passive and
Witness nodes automatically. It also creates DRS anti-affinity rules if DRS is enabled on
the destination cluster and uses Storage DRS for initial placement if enabled. There is
some flexibility built into this workflow such that users can choose specific destination
hosts, datastores, and networks for each node. But the idea is that this is a very simple,
easy way to get a vCenter HA cluster up and running.
The alternative is the Advanced workflow. This workflow can be used when the Active,
Passive, and Witness nodes are to be deployed to different clusters, vCenter Servers
that are not part of the same SSO Domain, or even other data centers. This process
requires the administrator to manually clone the source vCenter Server for the Passive
and Witness nodes and then place those nodes in the desired locations with the
appropriate IP address settings. This is certainly a more involved process but allows for
greater flexibility for those customers who require it.
The graphic above breaks down when to use the Basic or Advanced workflows to enable
vCenter HA. Remember that these two workflows produce an identical solution. There is
no additional functionality gained by using the advanced workflow. The Basic workflow

HOL-1811-02-SDC
should be used whenever possible as it is really the easy button for enabling vCenter
Server HA. There is far more work when performing the Advanced workflow.
vCenter High Availability Additional Information
For more information in VCHA, please refer this lightboard video. Also, the next lesson
will walk you through configuring VCHA using a simulation.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
vCenter Server Appliance: Platform

Services Controller High Availability
(PSC HA)
The vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 introduces a native option to protect a vCenter Server
deployment from failures in hardware, hosts, and vCenter Appliance services.
The Platform Services Controllers (PSC) will also support High Availability natively, but
do require an external load balancer when configuring external Platform Services
Controllers for High Availability. In this lab, we have provided an Interactive
Simulation (iSIM) on configuring High Availability for the vCenter Server Appliance.
Also configuring the Platform Services Controllers for High Availability is an advanced
task, so we have only provided some basic architectural information about this
configuration.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Platform Services Controller High Availability (PSC HA)
In a few pages from this one, we have an Interactive Simulation (iSIM) on configuring
vCenter Server High Availability, it contains the previous version of the vSphere Web
Client. So be aware in the simulation after clicking on the vCenter server, we then click
on the Manage tab instead of the Configuration tab that is in the new version. There will
be some name differences as well as what is in the pages that will look different
between the old and newer version of the vSphere Web Client. But the setup is
essentially the same process.
We are also providing Platform Services Controller High Availability (PSC HA) which
means you will need to use a third-party load balancer to get High Availability (HA) for
your Platform Services Controller (PSC) infrastructure.
The PSC will operate more like DNS, where each vCenter will now know where all the
Platform Services Controllers are in it’s domain. In the event that any Platform Services
Controllers service fails, then the vCenter will automatically fail over to the next
Platform Services Controller. The diagram above shows how this works. The large arrows

HOL-1811-02-SDC
are where the vCenter is affinitized to (where it was installed against). If a Platform
Services Controller fails, the vCenter can fail over through one of the dotted lines to
another Platform Services Controller.
The High Availability mode is realized when the vCenters and Platform Services
Controllers are all at the same functional level (everything is at same major build level).
You can operate in mixed mode but PSC HA won’t be operational.
For more detailed information on how to configure High Availability for the Platform
Services Controllers along with the vCenter Server Appliance 6.5, refer to this VMware
KB article here.
NOTE: Links in the lab manual are for reference only and the Hands On Lab
environments MAY NOT be connected to the internet. So we are unable to access them
in most cases, however we can save the link by taking note of the web address or taking
a picture with the camera on a cellular phone.
vSphere Web Client (Newest Version)
NOTE: In this lesson, we are only referring the screen captures and not actually looking
at and manipulating anything in the lab environment you are currently working in.
Depending on what version of the vSphere Web Client we may be looking at, we will see
some slight differences such as names of tabs and buttons in the main content pane. In
this particular lesson where we are discussing the configuration of High Availability for
the vCenter Server:
1. We see that the tab name is called Configure to get to the configuration section
for vCenter Server High Availability. (in the new version the tab is called Manage)
2. Then once we click on vCenter HA, we then click on the Configure button. (in
the old client the button is called New Configuration)

HOL-1811-02-SDC
vSphere Web Client (Previous Version)
In the Interactive Simulation (iSIM) that we will watch shortly, we have the previous
version of the vSphere Web Client than what is currently in the lab environment:
1. The simulation has us click on the vCenter Server and then the Manage tab. (in
the new client the tab is called the Configure tab)
2. Then we will select vCenter HA and click on the New Configuration button to
start to configure High Availability. (in the new client the button is called
Configure)
Hands On Labs - Interactive Simulation (iSIM): vCenter

Server High Availability
Now we are going to launch the Interactive Simulation (iSIM). This simulation will walk
us through the configuration of vCenter Server High Availability. Once finished with the
Interactive Simulation (iSIM), please return to this page of the lab manual to continue
with this module.
Interactive Simulation (iSIM): vCenter Server High Availability - CLICK HERE TO

START THE INTERACTIVE SIMULATION (iSIM)
NOTE: The current video was recorded with the previous version of the vSphere Web
Client. So you will see some the tab names and screens are slightly different from the
most current version of the vSphere Web Client. Also, when in the Interactive Simulation
(iSIM) where it has you type something into a text field, it will enter in the proper text
for you no matter what you try to type into the text fields.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
vCenter Server Appliance and Platform Services Controller

High Availability Overview Complete
Although this was a brief overview of the architecture associated to setting up external
Platform Services Controllers in High Availability, we hope that the options for vCenter
Server architecture makes more sense now as to why and how you may architect a
vSphere environment based on individual needs.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Demonstrate resilience to network

component failures
This lab shows how to use the VMware vSphere web client to enable and configure
network redundancy to protect the systems against network failures.

Bar


HOL-1811-02-SDC
Login to vCenter

HOL-1811-02-SDC

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Firstly let’s look at the status of the lab and the Platform Services Controller
configuration:
Login in to RegionA vCenter and verify it is operating as expected
1. Click on link in Favorites Bar - RegionA vCenter

2. Check the Use Windows session authentication checkbox
3. Click Login

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Navigate to Hosts and Clusters
1. First, go to the "Home" button

2. Select "Hosts and Clusters"
Verify the Teaming and failover virtual switch
1. Ensure you are on the Networking navigation tab.

2. Click VM-RegionsA01-vDS-COMP.
3. Select the Configure tab.
4. Click the Policies under Settings section.
5. Observe the Teaming and Failover configuration for the VM Network
portgroup.
Here we can see that the portgroup has been configured to distribute the network traffic
across all available uplinks using the Route based on originating virtual port policy.
It will detect a network failure only if a link is declared down at the layer 2 level. We can

HOL-1811-02-SDC
also see that if an uplink comes back online again after a failure, it will be automatically
added to the network team.
Verify the virtual switch uplinks configuration on the hosts
1. Ensure you are on the Hosts and Clusters navigation tab.

2. Click esx-01a.corp.local.
4. Under Networking, select Virtual switches from the menu.
5. click RegionA01-vDS-COMP
6. Expand the first and the second uplink of the VM-RegionA01-vDS-COMP01
virtual switch
7. Confirm that the html5-app VM is running, and if it isn't, start it.
From that screen you can easily observe that there are two active uplinks for
RegionA01-vDS-COMP on that host. The first uplink is vmnic0. As we can see, the
Management Network, the Storage Network and the vMotion Network rely on the two
uplinks to communicate with storage, other ESXi hosts and allow remote management.
We will simulate an uplink failure, where one of the two uplinks will get disconnected.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Simulate and network link failure
Using the vSphere Web Client, we can easily trace the network interfaces being used by
a virtual machine for example. In this case we can see that virtual machine html5-app
has network traffic being routed through vmnic0 and vmnic1.
Test network connectivity
1. Click the Command Prompt icon on the ControlCenter Desktop.

2. Type ping 192.168.100.90 -t and press Enter.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
3. Confirm that you are receiving a response from html5-app.
Let the ping command continue sending requests.
Connect to the ESXi host
1. Click the Putty icon on the ControlCenter Desktop.

2. Select esx-01a.corp.local in the Saved Sessions list.
3. Click Load
4. Click Open

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Change the link status of the uplink vmnic0
Type
esxcli network nic down -n vmnic0
and press Enter.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Network response time
Switch back to the Command Prompt and stop the ping command by pressing CTRL-C
Scroll up until you can spot slightly longer response time. In this example we were
consistently getting our response under 1ms. At the moment we disabled the uplink, the
response time increased to 19ms.
Please note that because of the HOL environment, you may not see a ping with a
delayed response.
Taking note of the error message
Switch back to Chrome
1. Select RegionA01-COMP01.
2. Click on the Summary tab.
3. Observe the error message being displayed.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Verify the uplink state on the host
1. Select esx-01a.corp.local.
3. Click Virtual switches.
4. Select RegionA01-vDS-COMP.
5. Scroll to see the uplinks status.
Here we can see that the state of the uplink is being reflected on that screen.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Physical adapter status
1. Click on Physical adapters

2. Select vmnic0
3. Observe the detailed information for the vmnic0 that we disabled.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Change the link status of the uplink vmnic0 back to normal
Type
esxcli network nic up -n vmnic0
and press Enter.
Conclusion
This concludes the Teaming and Failover lesson.
We were able to successfully demonstrate the vSphere is able to transparently balance

network traffic and failover in the advent of a network link failure.
Lesson clear up - please close the command prompt and putty session.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
vSphere Replication
VMware vSphere Replication is a hypervisor-based, asynchronous replication solution for
vSphere virtual machines. It is fully integrated with VMware vCenter Server and the
vSphere Web Client. vSphere Replication delivers flexible, reliable and cost-efficient
replication to enable data protection and disaster recovery for all virtual machines in
your environment.
VMware Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) solutions drive automation,
efficiency, data protection, and validation of an organization's enterprise-level BC/DR
strategy. Learn how to reduce downtime and increase availability for your applications
and services with Site Recovery Manager (SRM).
For a deeper level of understanding of Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and vSphere
Replication, please consider the following lab: HOL-1805-01-SDC: Site Recovery
Manager - Data Center Migration and Disaster Recovery.

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Conclusion
This module introduced you to the tools and features that you have access to
that will help you ensure that your virtual infrastructure stays available
through a variety of use cases and scenarios. It discussed the new High
Availability feature for the vCenter Server Appliance. It also showed you you
could protect your network against failure, and this in introduced some
advanced Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery topics.
If you are looking for additional information on High Availability and Business Continuity,
try one of these:
your pace.
• Consider taking 1805-01-Site Recovery Manager - Data Center Migration
and Disaster Recovery for additional ways and options for protecting your
virtual infrastructure.


HOL-1811-02-SDC
How to End Lab

HOL-1811-02-SDC
Conclusion
Thank you for participating in the VMware Hands-on Labs. Be sure to visit
http://hol.vmware.com/ to continue your lab experience online.
Lab SKU: HOL-1811-02-SDC
Version: 20171020-145922

Hol 1811 02 SDC - PDF - en

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Hol 1811 02 SDC - PDF - en

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

HOL-1811-02-SDC

Lab Module List:

• Module 1 - vCenter Server Appliance as a First Choice (60 minutes) (Basic)

• Module 7 - vCenter Server Appliance Migration (30 minutes) (Basic) This

• Modules 1, 2, and 5-8 - Anoop Jalan, Staff SE, US

Location of the Main Console

Alternate Methods of Keyboard Data Entry

Click and Drag Lab Manual Content Into Console Active

Accessing the Online International Keyboard

Click once in active console window

1. Click once in the active console window.

Click on the @ key

1. Click on the "@ key".

Notice the @ sign entered in the active console window.

Activation Prompt or Watermark

This cosmetic issue has no effect on your lab.

Look at the lower right portion of the screen

Module 1 - vCenter Server

vCenter Server Appliance Overview

Why VCSA 6.5 Should Be The Default Deployment Choice

There are several other general improvements:

• VMware Update Manager is now part of the vCenter Server Appliance

vSphere Update Manager Integration

vSphere Update Manager enables centralized, automated patch and version

1. Upgrade and Patch ESXi hosts

vSphere Update Manager Web Client

It is also recommended to complete HOL-1811-03-SDC "vSphere with

What's new in vSphere Update Manager 6.5

Update Manager Web Client

Update Manager Download Service

vSphere Update Manager Download Service (UMDS) is an optional module of Update

Update Manager Utility

vCenter Server Availability

Roles for each type of node in a vCenter HA cluster

• Node that runs the active instance of vCenter Server

• Node that runs as the passive instance of vCenter Server

• Serves as a quorum node

How does vCenter Server High Availability work?

Note that the RTO for a failover is approximately 5 minutes.

Platform Services Controller

vCenter Server and Platform Services Controller

vCenter Server with an Embedded Platform Services

Deployment Workflow of a vCenter Server Appliance with

Platform Services Controller and vCenter Server Appliance

• Less resources consumed by the shared services in the Platform Services

• This model is suitable for large-scale environments that consist of multiple

Deployment Topologies with External Platform Services

Compatible Load Balancers:

Example of a Pair of Platform Services Controller Instances

• 1 vSphere Single Sign-On domain

Platform Services Controller Across vCenter Single Sign-

• 1 Single Sign-On domain

Platform Services Controller High Availability with vCSA -

vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA)

Open Chrome Browser from Windows Quick Launch Task

Gain screen space in Chrome by zooming out

1. Select the Options menu in Chrome.

Log in to Appliance Management UI

Log in to the Appliance Management UI to monitor the vCenter Server

1. Click the HOL Admin bookmark.

Back up the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) using the

To begin the process of backing up the appliance:

Backup Appliance Wizard - Enter Backup Type and

 To begin the process of backing up the appliance: