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.

Adding a new feature among these is the recent update to their main backup tool for the cloud: Azure Backup Server now supports VMware virtual machines. MABS (Microsoft Azure Backup Server) it is not a new tool, it’s been around for a while now offering backups for Hyper-V virtual machines, physical machines, file servers, SQL, SharePoint, and Exchange.

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.

The Auto Deploy is one of the underestimated vSphere features. I have seen many vSphere Designs where using Auto Deploy was outlined as overcomplicating and manual build of ESXi servers was preferred. That is pretty frustrating as we, as IT professionals, strive to automate as much as possible in our day to day work.

VMware has long stopped adding newly released features and functionality into the old С# client in hopes to push their customers into using the vSphere Web Client.  However, even by restricting new features only to the Web Client adoption has been slow – partly due to change, no one likes change, but mostly due to the slowness and the overall sluggishness that is experienced using the flash-based vSphere Web Client.

As far back as at VMworld 2014, VMware announced VMware Project Fargo technology, also broadly known as VMFork. It allows to make a working copy of a running virtual machine on VMware vSphere platform very fast.

When time comes to deciding whether to go with vSphere Distributed Switch or Cisco Nexus 1000v it is hard to tell which product is superior and you find many different and quite contradictory opinions. While quite often it is the political decision based on the answer to the question “Who is going to manage the virtual networking?” there are many other aspects you, as an infrastructure designer, should be aware of.