Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Back to Basics: Install, configure and use vSphere Replication

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One of the coolest features that has been included with vSphere 5.1 in my opinion is vSphere Replication. (Make sure to read the what’s new paper) The reason for it being is that it now brings “advanced” technology to everyone (Essentials Plus and upwards). I have used vSphere Replication in 5.0 and it was nice, but with 5.1 the installation and configuration process has been improved. For instance the database is now included in the appliance and it isn’t as DNS sensitive as it was with 5.0. This makes installing and configuring it a matter of minutes.

I am going to assume you have “vSphere Replication” traffic enabled on a VMkernel NIC, if you do not know how to create a VMkernel NIC check this article

Lets get started. I downloaded the vSphere Replication virtual appliance and imported and configured it in just a couple of steps using the vSphere 5.1 Web Client: [Read more…] about Back to Basics: Install, configure and use vSphere Replication

Software Defined Datacenter video

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I really love this youtube video by various VMware people about the Software Defined Datacenter. Especially the animations in there are awesome. I suggest to just watch it,

Back to Basics: Using the vSphere 5.1 Web Client to configure iSCSI

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In this article I will take you through the steps required to setup iSCSI using the vSphere 5.1 Web Client. In most iSCSI environment the VMware software iSCSI adapter is used, so that is what I will use. I had already setup a storage VMkernel NIC in one of my previous post, read that if you haven’t yet. Adding a software adapter can be done in a couple of simple steps:

  • On the “Manage” section of your host click on “Storage”
  • Click the green “plus” and select “Software iSCSI adapter”
  • Click “OK”
  • Now a new adapter will be added to the “Storage Adapters” list

[Read more…] about Back to Basics: Using the vSphere 5.1 Web Client to configure iSCSI

Back to Basics: Using the vSphere 5.1 Web Client to add an NFS share to all hosts

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If you look at the following workflow you know why I am starting to love NFS more and more… Adding an NFS datastore was easy with 5.0 (and prior) but with 5.1 it is even easier. Just a couple of steps to add an NFS datastore to your cluster:

Back to Basics: Using the vSphere 5.1 Web Client to configure a vSwitch

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In the previous articles we created a Datacenter, a cluster and added hosts to it. Now that we have done that we can start finalizing the configuration. This is just one example out of the many ways to configure networking for an ESXi host, and I kept it really really simple. This is not following any best practices, I just wanted to show some of the steps. In this scenario I have 4 network cards per host and I have VLANs for each network segment. Separating traffic through the use of VLAN is highly recommended and is a best practice.

Lets configure the virtual switch first. I will use a “standard vSwitch” for now. In this case we will set all vmnics to active on the vSwitch and control NIC usage on a portgroup level. [Read more…] about Back to Basics: Using the vSphere 5.1 Web Client to configure a vSwitch