VMware vCenter server appliance is evolving with every major release of VMware vSphere Suite. The product, which manages the whole vSphere infrastructure, can be either installed on a Windows server or deployed as pre-configured virtual appliance called vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA). Over several VCSA releases, VMware managed to make this product equal to the Windows-based one, and it pushes the development even further so now the Linux based product has more features than the vCenter server installed on Windows. However, many VMware admins are also Microsoft guys and like the graphical user interface to work with. That’s why today we’ll have a look at 5 Tips to manage this appliance. We won’t go into the configuration steps within this post as this has been documented many times.

Throughout the last month, VMware has released two important updates for virtual infrastructure management server – VMware vCenter 6.5 Update 1d and 1e. Both updates have significantly improved the functionality of the vCenter management server, despite it’s just one more letter added to Update 1.

When it comes time for your vSphere upgrade there are many different approaches to how you perform the upgrades on your ESXi hosts.   An administrator who looks after a small cluster may update one way, whereas an administrator who looks after an enterprise with 1000s of hosts may opt to go another.  Also, depending on how your environment is deployed you might want to choose one method over another.  Factors such as a whether or not your hosts are managed by a vCenter server, whether or not they are members of a cluster – these things all impact the methods in which you chose to update to the latest version of ESXi.  Certainly, some methods are much more simplistic than others to perform, some offer more advantages when upgrading at scale, and some are more prone to user error – let’s take a look at each method of upgrading our hosts below and discuss the benefits and drawbacks of each…

As all of you know, VMware Labs posts handful utilities for VMware administrators to make the management of vSphere virtualization infrastructure easier. Those tools are being developed by VMware Engineers, Community, and Open Source. Today I would like to emphasize some of the latest tools available to download and implement.

Very often, VMware vSphere administrators have to find the reasons of performance issues by analyzing the historical data of various metrics on the VMware vCenter Server. However, sometimes the default set of metrics is not enough if you view performance data for the previous night or the end of the past week – in this case, you need to change the level of collected metrics and, possibly, the frequency of their collection and retention. In the VMware vCenter Server settings, you can set the data collection levels, different collection intervals and the time period that the data will be stored on the Server. In addition, you can set an approximate size of the virtual infrastructure in the host servers and virtual machines, which will allow to roughly estimate the size of the vCenter database. Let’s take a closer look at these settings.

A number of improvements that have been introduced in vSphere HA and DRS in the last several years are impressive. vSphere 6.5 continues this tradition by bringing new features into HA Admission Control, by adding flexibility with HA Orchestrated Restart and by enabling DRS to make more intelligent balancing. I will be trying a new format today. First, I will be explaining the challenges you might have had in previous vSphere releases and then I will show you how the new vSphere 6.5 HA & DRS features address those challenges.

In this second part of VCHA review I will be covering some ‘gotchas’ and configuration steps that are not covered in the VMware availability guide We will also go through all steps of Advanced Configuration.

High Availability for vCenter Server has never been as important as today when there are so many products dependant on vCenter, e.g. VMware NSX, vSAN, Horizon View, etc. VMware tried different approaches to bring HA to the vCenter.

This day has come – vSphere 6.5 has been just announced. As many of you I have been waiting for the presentation of new vSphere during VMworld event in the USA, but I guess VMware preferred to use vSphere 6.5 as a treat for those who were in doubt whether to attend VMworld Europe or not after all VMworld US were made available online to everyone; or perhaps VMware hasn’t decided what features should be included into the GA release. In this post, I will try to cover all new features of vSphere 6.5 and VSAN 6.5, but if I missed something feel free to let me know by leaving a comment. To be honest, there is so much to talk about and some of the new features require separate posts to be explained properly. Therefore, please don’t expect detailed review of the every single feature.. This is more ‘What’s new in vSphere 6.5 and VSAN 6.5’ overview, but in the future posts I will be talking about some of the most interesting improvements and enhancements in detail.