Eric Sloof

Gain hands-on experience with VMware vCenter Protect, VMware's unified IT management platform for Microsoft-based machines. You will complete essential IT management functions in a modern infrastructure. With these hands-on exercises, you will learn how vCenter Protect can be used by your organization to improve patch management capabilities, resolve antivirus issues, simplify IT administration tasks, and manage both physical and virtual machines - all through a unified user interface. Other key technologies highlighted in this lab include vCenter Protect's Patch Management, Threat Management, Power Management, and Asset Inventory capabilities.

This lab explores the new features of the vSphere Distributed Switch (vDS). In this lab you will use the new import\export features to repair a misconfigured vDS, save an optimized vDS configuration and finally use the optimized vDS configuration to build a new vCenter. You will also learn about how the new rollback and recovery features can be used to solve many common network issues quickly and easily. Finally, you will explore the utility and value of the new health check feature.

Learn how to use VMware Auto Deploy to scale and manage ESXi deployments or upgrades. With these hands-on exercises, you will learn how Auto Deploy can be used by your organization to manage vSphere upgrades in an automated fashion and improve internal standards and compliance.

This lab will give you the information needed to detect and resolve common performance problems critical for performance tuning and maximizing your virtual environments. You will learn that by using easy-to-use management tools like VMware vCenter Server and vCenter Operations Manager, you can find and resolve most performance issues.

In this lab you will leverage various VMware technologies to implement disaster recovery protection for a vCloud Director managed infrastructure. You will implement an automated DR plan and then initiate a live failover of private cloud infrastructure to a recovery site. Upon completion of the failover, you will verify the recovery of both the vApp workloads and cloud management services. The use of automated dependency mapping will be reviewed to ensure all application components are protected.

http://hol-cme.cloudfoundry.com/index.html

• Support for hardware version 9, the latest CPU performance counters and virtual shared graphics acceleration designed for enhanced performance.
• For better space efficiency vSphere supports storage space reclamation for VDI. 

• Support for VXLAN
• Enhanced vSphere Distributed Switch that supports:
• Network health check
• Backup and restore
• Rollback and recovery
• Link Aggregation Control Protocol support
• Single-root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV)

• VMware vSphere vMotion® without the need for shared storage configurations.
• VMware vSphere Data Protection for simple and cost effective backup and recovery, 
• vSphere Replication enables efficient array-agnostic replication of virtual machine data over the LAN or WAN. 

• vSphere Web Client 
• vCenter Single Sign-On
• VSA enhancements
• Support for Additional Disk Drives
• Increase Storage Capacity Online
• vCenter running on the VSA Cluster

This technical note describes how to install, upgrade, and uninstall vCenter Server and related components by using the Windows command‐line interface. The command‐line installation requires you to log on to the local machine.

The command‐line installation process includes downloading the vCenter Server installer, gathering the required data, and using the command parameters and samples in this technical note to install the products according to your specifications.

vCenter Server 5.1 with vCenter Single Sign On 

vSphere 5.1 introduces the vCenter Single Sign On service as part of the vCenter Server management infrastructure. This change affects vCenter Server installation, upgrading, and operation. As part of this change, vCenter Inventory Service is now installed separately from vCenter Server.

When you install or upgrade vCenter Server 5.1, you must install vCenter Single Sign On and install or upgrade vCenter Inventory Service, in that order, before you install or upgrade vCenter Server.

IMPORTANT VMware does not support command‐line installation and upgrade methods for vCenter Server. However, if the installation or upgrade succeeds, VMware supports the installed or upgraded product.

VMware vSphere 5.1 vMotion presents a unified migration architecture that migrates live virtual machines, including their memory and storage, between vSphere hosts without any requirement for shared storage. This shared-nothing live migration feature offers administrators significantly more simplicity and flexibility in managing and moving virtual machines across their virtual infrastructures compared to the traditional vMotion and Storage vMotion migration solutions.

A series of tests were conducted at VMware Performance labs to investigate and compare the performance implications of vSphere 5.1 vMotion over the proven vMotion and Storage vMotion technologies in various scenarios including the migration of a database server and an in-memory application. In addition, live migration tests were performed over metro area network scenarios. Test results show the following:

• During storage migration, vSphere 5.1 vMotion maintains the same performance as Storage vMotion, even when using the network to migrate, due to the optimizations added to the vSphere 5.1 vMotion network data path.
• During memory migration, vSphere 5.1 vMotion maintains nearly identical performance as the traditional vMotion, due to the optimizations added to the vSphere 5.1 vMotion memory copy path.
• vSphere 5.1 vMotion retains the proven reliability, performance, and atomicity of the traditional vMotion and Storage vMotion technologies, even at metro area network distances.

VMware vSphere has provided the ability to migrate a running virtual machine across vSphere hosts from the earliest vSphere versions. VMware vMotion was the first live migration solution that provided the ability to migrate a running virtual machine from one vSphere host to another host, with no perceivable impact to the end user. vMotion brought enormous benefits to administrators—it reduced server downtime and facilitated automatic load-balancing. Because vMotion moved only the memory and device state of a virtual machine, it limited the live migration to hosts with shared storage.

Later versions of vSphere featured Storage vMotion technology that provided the ability to live migrate the virtual disks belonging to a virtual machine across storage elements on the same host. Storage vMotion brought additional valuable benefits to administrators—it prevented storage downtime and facilitated automatic storage load-balancing.

Together, vMotion and Storage vMotion technologies provided the ability to migrate the entire state of the virtual machine, including its memory and storage, across vSphere hosts. However, this live-migration solution was limited to the hosts that shared a common set of datastores. In addition, migration of an entire virtual machine required two separate operations, for instance vMotion followed by Storage vMotion, or vice versa.

vSphere 5.1 vMotion presents an integrated migration solution enabling live migration of an entire virtual machine across vSphere hosts without any requirement for shared storage. This live migration feature simplifies the management and movement of virtual machines across virtual infrastructures compared to the traditional vMotion and Storage vMotion migration solutions. More importantly, the new vMotion architecture retains the proven reliability, performance and atomicity of current vMotion and Storage vMotion technologies, even at metro area network distances.