V Center 5 - Some questions

higherho

Hello Good forum,

We are entering virtualized world and this is the only part of Server work that I've yet to encounter. I am more than willing to study / read up on things I'm not to sure of. I do have a decent amount of Windows server experience (03 and 0 migrations, server clusters, IIS configuration, PKI setup) but I need to start getting into virtualization (other than VMware workstation for home testing).

What books do you recommend? I need good points and not long winded stories that Odom gives in his CCNA studies (great books, and they helped me a lot but he takes a while to get to the point).

I've been watching youtube / CBT videos and getting familiar with certain aspects. Any advice?

Respectfully,
Higherho

Essendon

First, congrats on the new gig!!

I cannot speak highly enough of Scott Lowe's Mastering vSphere 5 book, that thing is the best tech book I've ever read. Get your hands on it.

Ensure you lab up as you go. None of the material will make sense if you dont see it happening.

How much do you want to learn the product? Cert level or just daily-grind level?

higherho

Thanks Essendon I will check out that book and great question! I want to learn enough to sustain and maintain a virtualized environment. I would like to get to an above average understanding of the product / tool.

One thing I will have to do is setup SCCM in a virtualized environment. I've setup SCCM in a non virtualized before (curse those agents for not installing so easily the first time).

Essendon

LOL@ how you go - V Center 5! They call it vCenter 5! n00b error, I know - j/k...

That book is the way to go if you want to know the product well. vCenter is the name of the management server that's used to manage ESXi/ESX. With vSphere 5, VMware have done away with ESX. It's only ESXi now, the difference is the absence of the Service Console. There are other differences between the two iterations, but this is one of the biggest.

You'll be okay with SCCM running in a VM. We have it that way in our company, there are 2 SCCM servers that serve about 3500 computers and 300 or so servers (most of which are VM's).

Have you got a 64bit machine? You'll need one to install ESXi on and run 64bit guest VM's. There are plenty of tutorials to get you started. Here's a link that helped me immensely when I nested ESXi inside of ESXi. This let me use a single beefy machine to run multiple virtual ESXi servers and a slew of Win7/2008/2003 client virtual machines.

http://tsmith.co/2011/creating-a-nested-esxi-5-environment/

higherho

Essendon wrote: »

LOL@ how you go - V Center 5! They call it vCenter 5! n00b error, I know - j/k...

Hehe I will remember that :P I used to type Cisco IOS like iOS and when I did that on a facebook status I was flamed!

That book is the way to go if you want to know the product well. vCenter is the name of the management server that's used to manage ESXi/ESX. With vSphere 5, VMware have done away with ESX. It's only ESXi now, the difference is the absence of the Service Console. There are other differences between the two iterations, but this is one of the biggest.

You'll be okay with SCCM running in a VM. We have it that way in our company, there are 2 SCCM servers that serve about 3500 computers and 300 or so servers (most of which are VM's).

Nice, sounds good and I ordered the book from amazon

Have you got a 64bit machine? You'll need one to install ESXi on and run 64bit guest VM's. There are plenty of tutorials to get you started. Here's a link that helped me immensely when I nested ESXi inside of ESXi. This let me use a single beefy machine to run multiple virtual ESXi servers and a slew of Win7/2008/2003 client virtual machines.

Creating a Nested ESXi 5 Environment | Tim's IT Blog

Yes I have two 64 bit machines and thanks for the link!

dave330i

LabGuides.com – Autolab

pumbaa_g

Found a good site for Home Labs Lab | ESX Virtualization sign up for the newsletter and there is a nice free ebook about how to make a home lab with limited resources.

higherho

Thanks for all the information. I've ordered Scott's book and should be getting it before Monday. I've imported a ton of OVA's for our one lab environment and setup some roles and permissions for that particular virtualized environment (have quite a few). Mounted / binded a few data centers and have them setup for Round Robin (iscsi SANS, no fiber channel ) 8TB for each store but it seems I'm going to be needing 16 TB each (some big projects).

The Networking end of this is taking me a little longer for my mind to wrap around (I'm used to the physical networking stuff easy but it takes me a bit longer to setup a network in Vcenter). When our testers come I will be giving them the ability to clone our clean test environment so that each tester has their own little environments. Overall, I'm having a lot of fun with Vcenter. Right now I have 4 ESXi boxes (three running 5.1 and the 4th running 5.0 because apparently there some bugs with the convertor tool converting something straight to 5.1 it has to go to 5.0 first).


EDIT

Now looking into options to backing up my VM's that are sitting on my SANs. I also need to setup a snapshot system too in Vcenter (or really just a process for my self). I was going to make some xcopy script to copy off all my VM's to a couple TB external drives. Not sure what to use to back up my vcenter server yet (no backup software available atm )

dave330i

higherho wrote: »

Now looking into options to backing up my VM's that are sitting on my SANs. I also need to setup a snapshot system too in Vcenter (or really just a process for my self). I was going to make some xcopy script to copy off all my VM's to a couple TB external drives. Not sure what to use to back up my vcenter server yet (no backup software available atm )

vDR from VMware.

sratakhin

Veeam. They have a free version that does pretty much everything. If you need advanced features, it costs about $1000 for a single server license.

higherho

Thanks! I will look into these.

higherho

Scotts book is amazing! I love it :0

jibbajabba

higherho wrote: »

Scotts book is amazing! I love it :0

It is great ... This is too high level for you I THINK - but one other book worth to bookmark :

VMware vSphere 5.1 Clustering Deepdive.

It is written by Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman - both highly technical working for VMware ..

dave330i

After you're done with Scott's book, check out "Managing and Optimizing VMware vSphere Deployments"