Category: vCenter Server

Using VMware FT

Another new feature of VMware vSphere 4 is the ability to use Fault Tolerance or FT. It is the ability to have real high availability, This is, with previous versions of VMware, we had DRS, that if a physical host went down, the virtual machines running on it, they run on another host, Foresaw a restart of the virtual machines. What VMware FT gives us is the possibility that virtual machines do not have to be restarted, and in case of ESX host crash with virtual machines, those that are protected with FT will continue to run on another host without loss of service.

Using Host Profile in VMware vSphere

One way to help us in the configuration of our virtual environment is to rely on one of the new features that VMware vSphere brings 4, the ability to use already configured templates to apply to all our ESX hosts, or for when we add a new VMware ESX host to our virtual community, we can apply the same configurations that one of our hosts already has.. We can create a template from scratch by configuring everything manually or get said template from one of our servers already configured perfectly (being able to edit the profile if necessary), and then apply it to the rest of the hosts that do not meet the requirements that we indicate. This is called the VMware Host Profile.

Using Veeam Backup & Replication to make backups and replicas of our virtual environment

This Veeam product called Veeam Backup and Replication, offers us the possibility of both backups and replication of our VMware virtual environment, for both VMware Infrastructure 3 How to VMware vSphere 4 (VMware ESX or VMware ESXi, depending on the license purchased, that the product is paid for, but very cheap). It will allow us to make backups of the virtual machines that we indicate in the location that interests us, We will be able to keep as many copies of the same virtual machine as we are interested in, as Veeam will store them incrementally. Personally, what I like is the replication, since the backup is given to us by VCB or VMware Data Recovery, replication can be carried out in another storage array that we have and the replicated virtual machines will be optionally placed in the VMware inventory, just like backups, We can have so many replicas […]

Using VMware Data Recovery to Back Up VMware vSphere

VMware Releases New Virtual Machine Backup System Called VMware Data Recovery. It is a virtual appliance based on CentOs 5.2 which we will incorporate into our virtual environment, and with a plugin we can manage from the VMware client, as it integrates with our VMware vCenter Server. I have to tell you that I love how it works, is fully customizable, We can make backups of the virtual machines that we are interested in, We can indicate how many copies we want it to keep of each virtual machine and for how long; how many machines you keep for us for a specific time. The best thing is the technology you use to make backups called deduplication, This will prevent duplicate copies of virtual machines, but in the next copy it will only copy the differences with the complete copy, This is, an incremental copy! We will be able to restore the entire virtual machine, […]

Migrating VMware VI3 Virtual Network Environment to VMware vSphere with Distributed Switches

Well, once we have our entire virtual environment already migrated to the new version of VMWare vSphere 4.0, all servers running under VMware ESX 4.0 and our VMware vCenter Server as well, We will be able to enjoy its advantages, One of them is the new switch environment, called Distributed Switches or vNetwork Distributed Switches. With this we will achieve comfort when managing network environments, Much simpler, Change the way switches are configured, No more configuring a switch or virtual network for each host, otherwise, is a global environment, everything is done at the vCenter Server level and will apply to all of our hosts.

Migrate VMware ESX 3.x to VMware ESX 4.0 manually

This document shows how to migrate an ESX host from the VMware ESX release 3.5 to VMware ESX 4.0, but it is valid for any ESX 3.x, It is designed for small environments, of one or two host's, but it would not make sense since it is a manual update process, without the ability to schedule the task or perform more than one simultaneous migration or by specifying a migration order for our hosts.

Update VMware Tools and Automatically Upgrade Virtual Machine Hardware with Update Manager

This would be the last step for a successful migration of our VMware vCenter virtual environment 2.5 a VMware vCenter Server 4.0, once we already have the VMware vCenter Server in the version 4.0, we have migrated the VMware Update Manager to VMware vCenter Update Manager 4.0 and all our ESX hosts are already with ESX 4.0, 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 to the version 7.

Upgrade ESX 3.x to ESX 4.0 con VMware vCenter Update Manager

We continue in the process of migrating the VMware Virtual Infrastructure environment 3 to VMware vSphere 4. We first upgraded the VMware VirtualCenter server to VMware vCenter Server, later we will have migrated the VMware Update Manager component to VMware vCenter Update Manager 4.0. After this, we will now be able to upgrade from ESX to the 4.0. All this, of course, taking into account whether our ESX hosts are fully compatible with the new version, to do this, check it in the VMware HCL.

Migrate VMware Converter Enterprise to VMware vCenter Converter 4

Like VMware vCenter Update Manager, if we were using VMware VirtualCenter in our environment 2.5 the VMware Converter Enterprise, we need to update it to the latest version in order to use it in our new VMware vCenter environment 4.0. If we update the, We may continue to retain existing configurations in the previous environment or logs… It will be a process that we can carry out at any time, once we already have our VMWare vCenter server in the 4.0, We can upgrade it when we need it, once we update the Update Manager or at the end of the migration process.

Migrate VMware Update Manager 1.0 a VMware vCenter Update Manager 4.0

After migrating our VMware vCenter server from the 2.5 to the version 4.0 (HTTP://www.bujarra.com/?p=2700) we have to update the other components that we have installed, in this case we will update the VMware Update Manager environment 1.0 that we had in VMware Virtual Center 2.5 to the new environment for use with VMware vCenter 4.0 (vSphere), called VMware vCenter Update Manager 4.0. This will be a process to be performed before proceeding with the migration of the environment 2.5 a 4.0, since after updating the Update Manager, we will update ESX hosts from version 3.x to the 4.0, and then the virtual machines (both the hardware version of the 4 to the 7 and VMware Tools to the latest version). All this in future documents.