Installing your first VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0 Server

Installing VMware vSphere 7.0 is a fairly straight forward task, in simplistic terms, it involves grabbing hold of the ISO, whether that be from VMware or from the hardware vendor of your servers.

Once the ISO is obtained, mount it, boot your ESXi host hardware and follow the instructions that get presented on the screen.

The installation is really broken down into 4 steps.

Installing ESXi does have some requirements and the Hardware requirements are as follows. Make sure that you have the supported platform and for more information, visit the VMware compatibility guide

vSphere ESXi requires

·         At least two CPU cores

·         The NX/XD bit to be enabled for the CPU in BIOS

·         Requires a minimum of 4 GB of physical RAM, however provide at least 8 GB of RAM to run virtual machines.

·         To support 64-bit VMs enable hardware virtualisation on the host.

·         One of more Gigabit or faster NICs

·         A boot disk of 8 GB for USB or SD devices, if using HDD, SSD, or NVMe, then at least 32 GB of disk space. Also provide space for VMs if storing locally.

Once the ESXi host is installed, the host’s basic configuration will need to be configured, and this will be covered in a later blog.

How to use Horizon Module with PowerCLI

Today I've been looking at the Extensibility to Horizon View, but primarily using VMware PowerCLI with Horizon.

VMware Horizon PowerCLI provides Windows PowerShell cmdlets for administering VMware Horizon from the command line.

Windows PowerShell uses the Microsoft.NET object model and provides administrators with management and automation capabilities.

As with any console environment, you work with Windows PowerShell by running commands, which are called cmdlets. They follow the verb-noun structure for example Get-Help

View Connection Server includes more than 45 Windows PowerShell-based cmdlets. You can use these cmdlets with the VMware vSphere® PowerCLITM cmdlets. You can also use the VMware Horizon cmdlets to examine the configuration of vCenter Server systems and management of licensing, global configuration, connection brokers, pools, entitlements, and desktop-user assignment. This enhancement enables automation and scripting and provides extensibility to administration tasks.

VMware Horizon PowerCLI is installed during the View Connection Server installation.

For more information download the View Integration guide

For a quick overview watch the following video.

VMware video - vCenter Embedded Linked Mode

We got into a talk last week regarding vCenter Embedded linked mode with vCenter, and I found this video quite useful as a reference.

vCenter Server embedded linked mode enables you to connect multiple vCenter Servers together seamlessly without the need for external Platform Services Controllers.

All explained in 4 minutes, Thanks once again to VMware for providing these useful resources

VMware vSphere 6.7 - vCenter Deployment Topologies

On a number of the VMware courses that I deliver we talk about the VMware vCenter product.

I generally talk about vCenter, but I should actually talk about vCenter and the Platform Services Controller or PSC. It's historical and age that means I talk about the combined services as the vCenter.

In Summary these two bits of software do two different sets of services.

Lets start with the PSC , the PSC provides the following services.

• vCenter Single Sign-On (SSO)
• VMware License Server
• Lookup Service
• VMware Certificate Authority (CA)
• Certificate Store
• VMware Directory Service

The vCenter component provides the following services.

• vCenter Server
• vSphere Web Client (server)
• vSphere Update Manager (VUM)
• VMware vSphere Auto Deploy
• VMware vSphere ESXi Dump Collector
• VMware vSphere Syslog Collector

These two distinct bits of software can be installed on one box (embedded mode), or split between boxes (distributed mode).

Fiedhlim O'Leary of VMware has produced a lightboard talking about the ways in which vCenter can be deployed and the considerations for both.

VMware vSphere 6.7 vCenter Server High Availability Light Board

As mentioned in many of my posts, I am a VCI teaching VMware Data Centre Virtualisation courses, along with my presentations, I like to make as many resources available as possible to delegates.

One topic that always interests people on the VMware courses is vCenter high availability, with this in mind, it's worth a few minutes of your time to watch another light board by: 

Fiedhlim O'Leary of VMware presenting vCenter High Availability in vSphere 6.7

Enjoy

VMware vSphere 5.5 to 6.7 Upgrade lightboard

As you may be aware vSphere 5.5 is coming to end of life, in class I get asked about the upgrade process for 5.5 to 6.7.

We cover the upgrades on the VMware vSphere 5.5 to 6.7 What's New course.

However Fiedhlim O'Leary of VMware has produced a light board video on the subject of upgrading from VMware vSphere 5.5 to 6.7

VMware vSphere 6.7 What's New Overview Lightboard

VMware vSphere 6.7 has now been with us for a few weeks, and as a VCI this is now one of my areas of coverage.

Fiedhlim O'Leary of VMware has produced a nice little 5 minute presentation that's worth a look if you're interested in an overview of the new features.

VMware vSAN 6.7 product videos

Along with the release of VMware vSphere 6.7, we also got a new release of VMware's Software Defined Storage product vSAN, which is now also 6.7

VMware have produced some product related videos that are worth a watch

1) What's New in vSAN 6.7

2) vSAN 6.7 - WSFC support on vSAN!

3) vSAN 6.7 What's New Technical

4) vSAN 6.7 Technical Overview

VMware vSphere 6.7 demo videos

As a VMware Certified Instructor, I spend time evangelising VMware products, their newest product for compute virtualisation is VMware vSphere 6.7.

I generally find that when I'm learning a new product I like to play with that product, and read about the product, but in order to break up the mountains of reading, videos are always good to watch.

VMware have created a YouTube playlist with some nice little bite size videos of the functionality of VMware vSphere 6.7

Worth a watch.

VMware Cloud on AWS: Live End to End Demo

I've been looking at VMware Cloud on AWS since I first saw it at VMworld.

A lot of the delegates on my courses use on-premises VMware and are looking at a Hybrid Cloud Solution.

Ryan Kelly of VMware has produced a demo video of creating a VMC on AWS demo.

VMware Cloud on AWS: Live End to End Demo

He makes it look easy. Enjoy

New set of demo videos for System Center

This week, I'm delivering a Microsoft System Center course in Aberdeen and as demonstrations are important, and it's always good to get them to work, I have published my demo videos on Youtube.

I do this for my own benefit and also to hopefully give a better experience to the delegates who attend my courses.

The site is.

http://www.youtube.com/bryanqa

Hope they're of some use?