About This Guide
The purpose of the VMware vSphere 5.0 Installation Evaluation Guide Volume One, is to support a self-guided, hands-on evaluation of VMware vSphere 5.0 features usable by all VMware vSphere customers. The companion guide, the VMware vSphere 5.0 Evaluation Guide, Volume Two, is intended to highlight vSphere 5.0 features primarily targeted at larger, more complex deployment environments.
System Requirements
To ensure the best experience when using this guide, the user will need to configure hardware and software as detailed in the following section.
Hardware Requirements
This guide makes the following assumptions about your existing physical infrastructure:Servers
You must have at least three dedicated servers capable of running VMware ESXi™ 5.0 to provide resources for this evaluation.
You must have shared storage with enough space available to allow the creation of three 100GB dedicated data stores. Shared storage can be SAN or NAS. This document assumes SAN-based storage.
You must have at least three virtual networks configured to separate virtual machine, vMotion, and vSphere management. These networks can be set up on a single virtual switch with multiple port groups, or across multiple virtual switches. For the purpose of this evaluation guide, the configuration includes a single vSphere standard switch with three port groups.
For more detailed requirements, see the following table
For more detailed requirements, see the following tableSoftware and Licensing Requirements
VMware vSphere
This volume of the VMware vSphere 5.0 Evaluation Guide requires vSphere 5.0 and licensing for Essentials Plus.If the user intends to also complete the exercises in Volume Two of the VMware vSphere 5.0 Evaluation Guide, a license for Enterprise Plus will be required. The vSphere 5.0 evaluation license available from the VMware evaluation portal provides Enterprise Plus functionality for 60 days and is the best choice for performing the vSphere 5.0 evaluations.Guest Operating Systems
This volume of theVMware vSphere 5.0 Ev aluation Guide does not place any specific requirements on guest operating systems, other than ensuring that you can deploy running virtual machines. The user is free to deploy any VMware-supported operating system (OS) in the virtual machines. The VMware vSphere 5.0 EvaluationGuide, Volume Two, will require five or six virtual machines running Windows 2003 or Windows 2008.Environment Setup
The VMware Technical Marketing lab was built using a combination of Cisco UCS server hardware and EMC CLARiiON CX-4 Fibre Channel (FC) storage. The environment consisted of eight identical four-node “pods,” with most pods configured as a three-node ESXi cluster and a fourth node for management. In many cases,additional resources have been configured in the Technical Marketing test-bed configuration to support other evaluation projects, and are present in the diagrams. The user can configure only what is called for in the following section and can safely ignore additional resources in screen shots and topology diagrams. The following picture shows the Technical Marketing test rack.Server Configuration
Logical Network Setup
vSphere Evaluation Tasks
High Availability
Introduction Ensuring the availability of virtual machines within an environment is of paramount concern to administrators. VMware HA alleviates these concerns by providing protection from failures within the following three key layers.
The infrastructure layer:-
At this layer, VMware HA monitors the health of the virtual machine and will attempt to restart the virtual machine when a failure, such as the loss of a physical host, occurs. This protection is independent of the OS used within the virtual machine
The OS layer:-
Through the use of VMware Tools installed within the OS, VMware HA can monitor the OS for proper operation. This protects against such failures as an unresponsive OS.
The application layer:-
With some customization or with a third-party tool, an administrator can also monitor the application runningwithin the OS for proper operation. In the event of a failure of the application, HA can be triggered to restart the virtual machine hosting the application.
In this section, you will learn how to enable, configure, and test the operation of HA to provide basic high availability services for your virtual machines at the infrastructure layer.
Prerequisites
Before continuing, it is important that the environment be configured properly. Refer to the “System Requirements” section of this document and verify that the environment you are using is configured as documented. Specific areas of interest include the following:
- Ensure that you have a working management network with all hosts in the environment.
- Verify that all of the virtual machines are online.
- Have at least one virtual machine running on each host
- Validate that you have access to VMware vCenter™ utilizing the vSphere Client .
Enabling HA
Enabling HA is a straightforward process that simply entails editing the properties for the cluster. The following steps will guide you through this processConnect to Virtual Server
Using the vSphere Client, connect to your virtual server instance.
Go to Cluster Summary
Once connected to your virtual server instance, select your cluster by clicking on its name on the left-hand panel. Select the Summary tab to bring up the cluster summary screen.
Edit Cluster Settings
In the cluster summary screen, select the Edit Settings option. This will bring up a wizard that you can use to modify the settings of the cluster. Click the check box next to Turn On vSphere HA and select OK. This will close the wizard and the system will initialize VMware HA.
Under the Recent Tasks pane of the vSphere Client, you can observe the progress of the initialization of HA on the systems within the cluster. You’ll notice that the configuration tasks occur in parallel among all the hosts within the cluster.
Wait until all the tasks show a Completed status. This should only take a minute. At this point, VMware HA is now providing protection for the virtual machines that are powered on.
At this point, WMware HA should be enabled within your cluster. This section will demonstrate several methods you can use to verify that
HA is enabled.
After enabling HA, you will notice that a section for HA is now shown under the cluster summary screen. This will show you general information about the configuration of HA. There is also an option for Cluster Status here.
Click this to bring up the HA Cluster Status screen.
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