vSphere Storage Appliance – VSA

vSphere 5 vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA), a solution designed for small businesses that do not have the budget to purchase a storage array and want to have high availability in terms of storage or have features such as HA or VMotion, DRS… Thanks to this small appliance that runs on each host and through the VSA Manager, we will have the local datastores replicated between the ESXi hosts.

VMware vSphere Authentication Proxy

Already in a previous document of the version 4.1 we saw as a novelty that we could include our ESXi hosts in an Active Directory to authenticate directly with centralized accounts; one of the new features of vSphere 5 is the possibility of deploying an intermediate proxy between the hosts and our domain. All this to help in the deployment with Auto Deploy not to put users with passwords in configuration files, we will also be able to use it with hosts not deployed with Auto Deploy!

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.

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

Antes de actualizar nuestra infraestructura VMware vSphere a la versión VMware vSphere 5 (nuestros hosts a ESXi 5.0) debemos ejecutar una utilidad que tenemos en el DVD de VMware vSphere 5, donde podremos comprobar sin paradas de servicio si nuestros host ESXi son compatibles para una posible actualización de versión (de VMware ESXi 4.x a VMware ESXi 5.0) gracias a vCenter Agent Pre-upgrade Check tool.

Installing VMware ESXi 5

With the intention of making a series of articles that show us all the elements of the new version of vSphere 5 We will see different articles (more or less simple as this one is); where we will see the installation of the new VMware ESXi hypervisor 5, In this case we will carry out an interactive and manual installation, since we could deploy it massively over the network. Before doing so, we must prepare the installation medium CD/DVD or via a USB device.

What's New in vSphere 5 and licensing

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), since they even stop the entry of new customers O_o In addition, VMware is committed to giving us 7 years of support with the version 4.1, See…