Multipath Configuration for RHEL Servers

Today I share with you a procedure that my colleague 'Marcos Ortiz' has sent me, where we will see the configuration to be applied to RedHat machines in order to correctly configure the native multipath software when you have a Boot From SAN environment (BFS).

Upgrading VMs to vSphere 5 with Update Manager – Upgrade VMware Tools and Virtual Hardware Upgrade

To continue our migration to vSphere 5, once we already have the VMware vCenter server on the version 5, we have updated to VMware Update Manager 5 and all our ESXi hosts are already running the ESXi hypervisor 5, we will be able to upgrade the VMware Tools to the virtual machines as well as then upgrade the virtual hardware version of the version 4 or 7 to the version 8. We can do it manually VM by VM or automate it with Update Manager and update it in our environment in an orderly manner.

Actualización de un host ESXi 4.x a ESXi 5 with Update Manager

This will be the process of upgrading our hosts to the new VMware vSphere environment 5, we will be able to migrate ESX hosts 3.5, ESX 4.0 and ESX 4.1 to ESXi 5.0 and upgrade from ESXi 3.5, ESXi 4.0 and ESXi 4.1 to ESXi 5 automatically, ordered and managed; distributing the ESXi base image 5 on any of them keeping their settings. To do this, we will have to rely on VMware Update Manager, This document shows the steps we will need to update our hosts to the latest version.

Installing and Configuring VMware vSphere Update Manager Download Services

If you have a vCenter Update Manager server and it does not have Internet access (for whatever reason: Safety Issues…) to download the security patches of our vSphere environment we can use an intermediary server that downloads the updates and then passes them to the vCenter Update Manager server, in this document we will look at the installation and configuration of VMware vSphere Update Manager Download Services (UMDS).

Installing VMware vSphere Update Manager 5.0

In this document, we will see the installation of the VMware Update Manager component in vSphere 5, it will allow us to keep our VMware virtual environment updated, in this new version, only ESXi servers and VMware virtual appliances with their latest updates and upgrades will be supported, previously, we could also apply patches to Microsoft virtual machines & Linux. After installing the service, each client connecting to the vCenter will need to download and enable the Plugin to manage VUM,

Upgrading an ESX host(i) 4.x a ESXi 5 manually

In this document we will look at one of the ways to update our ESXi 4.x hosts (we could also migrate from ESX 4.x to ESXi 5.0 and ESX(i) 3.5 to ESXi 5), it will be in a manual/interactive way by entering the ESXi cd/dvd/usb 5.0 on the ESX host itself(i) 4.x. This is one of the simplest ways for smaller environments, In future documents we will see other forms of updates. Prior to the upgrade we will have verified that our hosts support the new hypervisor using Agent Pre-upgrade check,

vCenter Host Agent Pre-Upgrade Checker

Before updating our VMware vSphere infrastructure to VMware vSphere version 5 (our hosts to ESXi 5.0) we must run a utility available on the VMware vSphere DVD 5, where we can verify without service interruptions if our ESXi hosts are compatible for a potential version upgrade (from VMware ESXi 4.x to VMware ESXi 5.0) thanks to the vCenter Agent Pre-upgrade Check tool.

Introducing vSphere 5

This document is presented as a summary of the main new features of VMware vSphere 5 we will also try to explain the new and definitive licensing (now you also pay for RAM). Until a few days ago, the licensing of vSphere 5 even affected the free version by limiting it to 8Gb of RAM, until a few days ago they rectified it by limiting it to 32Gb (as well as the rest of the products), ya que incluso frenan la entrada de nuevos clientes. VMware se compromete a darnos 7 years of support with the version 4.1.