Welcome back to vSphere 8 in the real world. Now we're going to discuss vCenter server installation.
So when you have an ESXi host that you want to manage with vSphere, you need a vCenter server.
That's one of the first things you're going to need to deploy. So vCenter is going to be the
place where you're going to manage all your different resources that are in your vSphere
environment. Now if you have Horizon, you have a different management interface for Horizon. If you
have NSX, you have a different management interface for NSX. When it comes to the core of vSphere,
meaning DRS, and HA, and vMotion, and storage vMotion, and fault-tolerant VMs, and all those
different types of things, vCenter is where you're going to go to do all that management for those
core vSphere components. So you're going to deploy your vCenter server on an ESXi host.
It's a virtual appliance that is deployed onto one of those hosts. It's a central platform, like I
said, for management, for all your operations. If you want to get performance, there's performance
charts and tuning you can get in there. You can view logs through there. You can configure things
like NTP, and logging, and your syslog servers. All that kind of stuff is managed through your
vSphere server. Provisioning resources. This is where you're going to configure and
deploy virtual networking. This is where you're going to provision storage and create data stores.
This is where you're going to create virtual machines for your environment. It's all going to
be done through your vCenter server. Then, of course, any kind of testing for your VMs and
hosts and things like that will be done through vCenter as well. Some of the functions of your
vCenter server appliance. Authentication. Your authentication can be done. Now, you can configure
the vCenter server to use your AD accounts for logging into the vCenter server. You can also
create accounts on vCenter directly itself. Most of the time, you're probably going to use your AD
accounts. That's probably the most common type of little sign-on that I've seen. But it does have
its own single sign-on service that you can use, and you can create accounts right on there if you
want to as well. You can do authentication. Even if you're signing against Active Directory,
it still does that authentication against Active Directory for you. You manage all your certificates
in there. Tags. You can do all your tagging through vCenter. A lot of backup applications
can use tags. You can go in there. You can add tags to VMs and all your backup software. I want
all the VMs that have this certain tag to be backed up every hour, and all these VMs that have
this other tag to be backed up once every four hours. All backup applications have functionality
like that that can use tags. NSX also uses tags. You can use tags within NSX for creating ACLs and
things like that within NSX. And then all your licensing is also going to be managed and
configured. You're going to add licensing to vCenter through your vSphere client,
and that license is going to enable features. It'll allow you to have a certain number of posts,
a certain number of CPUs, actually. It will also allow you to use certain features. So,
if your license includes DRS, then you can configure DRS and manage DRS in vSphere,
things like that, HA, all that kind of stuff. So, the vCenter Server Appliance, it is a virtual
appliance, okay? So, it's going to be a virtual machine that you're going to deploy. There's a
wizard you're going to run through. I'll show you that in just a moment to deploy that appliance.
Most of the time, you can deploy it from a Linux box. You can deploy it from a Windows box.
Most of the time, I've seen it deployed. People log into a Windows box, and they run a setup
wizard. It actually has an OVF, so you can actually just go in and import the OVF directly.
I've seen people do that. That's not really the VMware-recommended, suggested way, but it
does also still work. You can still do it that way, too. Most people, though, that I've seen
most of the time are going to just use the setup wizard through a Windows server, okay?
So, the virtual appliance itself, it runs on VMware's own proprietary
Photon OS, which is a version of Linux, all right? All the authentication services that you'll use
for vSphere are going to be included with that. It has a Progress SQL database for all the logging
and configurations and all that stuff gets stored in the database. Obviously, Lifecycle Manager for
managing the vSphere environment for patching your hosts and that kind of stuff. You can also patch
vCenter through there. So, once we deploy vCenter, you can actually log into the vSphere web
interface for managing the vSphere application or the virtual appliance. So, you have your vSphere
client for managing vSphere, but it also is a web interface for managing that appliance directly,
for doing things like configuration of networking and that kind of stuff, as well as backups,
as well as updating or patching the virtual appliance, and we'll see that.
This slide is just kind of showing some of the maximums. The maximums haven't changed from seven
to eight. So, it does support only the HTML5 client, right? We also have our Lifecycle
Managers in here. So, host per server is 2,500. Powered on VMs per server is going to be 40,000.
Registered DBMs per server, 45,000. Hosts in a linked vCenter server, okay, that's 15,000.
So, host in a number of hosts in a linked vCenter servers, we can actually have multiple vCenter
servers, and we can link them so that when I log in, I see all the different vCenter servers that
I have linked together, and then in there, I can see all the data centers, I can see all the hosts,
I can see all the VMs, and I'll see them under their relevant vCenter server in there, right?
So, registered VMs in a linked vCenter server is going to be 150,000. So, a huge number of VMs
that we can link together and manage them all through one panel class, through one interface.
So, different ways we can deploy a vCenter server. We have a GUI deployment. So, again,
we can log into, like I mentioned, into a Windows server, for example, and we can run a setup,
and it'll run through this wizard. It's a two-phase wizard. The first one is going to deploy
the virtual appliance with just, you know, the base settings, like what size do you want it.
It gets an IP address, so you can manage it in the next part of setup, and some basic questions
get answered there. Then the second phase of that setup is going to be more specific to actually
configuring the virtual appliance, and we'll see that in a moment. You can also deploy the virtual
appliance. You want to do more of a hands-off approach from the CLI, and we'll show you how
to do that also. So, GUI installation. Here's where you can go, and you can download the ISO
to do a GUI installation. You might want to double-check that because it might be a little
different now with the Broadcom acquisition. I'm sure it's going to be different. You're going to
mount the ISO on one of your virtual machines, okay? So, a VM, you know, a Windows VM, for
example, that's running on there. Then run the installer. So, here it's showing you, for example,
if you're running a Windows host that you're going to deploy the OVF from. You're going to go to
Windows from the ISO, go to Windows, the Win32 subdirectory, and then there's going to be a
vcsa-ui, which, you know, user interface installer, and then you're going to run these
installer.exe. And Beth is going to go through this installation wizard, which will, again,
ask you a bunch of questions. It's going to be a two-phase wizard, one for just deploying the
virtual appliance and then one for configuring that virtual appliance once you have deployed.
So, let's go ahead and take a look at what the installer wizard looks like.
So, first thing is the intro, right? This kind of welcomes you there. You're going to go ahead
and the first option for deploying the vCenter server is chosen. You're going to go ahead and
say next. It's going to ask you to accept the end user license agreement. Of course,
you're going to deploy that, or you accept that. Then where do you want to deploy to?
You can give it the name or the IP address if DNS is configured for either a vCenter server
that you want to choose to deploy at the target or an ESXi host. Now, of course, if you choose
vCenter, one of the next things it's going to ask you is what host in vCenter do you want to choose
to deploy this to, all right? And then you're going to use the default port number 443 unless
for some reason you've changed that in the configuration, and then the name and the
password so you can authenticate. If you're saying a host, you might use the name root and the root
password. If you're saying a vCenter server, then you might use your AD credentials or your
admin, domain admin AD credentials, whatever you use to authenticate into vCenter,
you would enter in there, all right? Of course, probably a certificate warning, right?
So here, you're going to say what you want the name of your vCenter server to be,
okay? And of course, you're going to set a root password. And here, they just chose the IP address
as being for the name. So you're going to choose the root password and confirm that and the VM's
name. So now, it's going to ask what size vCenter do you want to deploy? You can choose a tiny,
a small, medium, large, or extra large. And obviously, the smaller it is, it has fewer
resources assigned to it, fewer virtual CPUs, smaller hard disks, and it's designed for a
smaller number of hosts running a smaller number of virtual machines. If you choose a larger
configuration, then you're going to assign it more virtual CPUs, it's going to use more disk space,
and you can configure and manage more hosts running more virtual machines.
And it's just showing you like, you know, the tiny is for up to 10 hosts running 100 VMs,
and the extra large is, you know, 2,000 hosts and what's that, 350,000 VMs.
So obviously, a pretty large environment.
So once you have selected where you want to deploy the host to, you got to select the
datastore you want to be deployed on. So, you know, a lot of environments will have
multiple datastores available to them. Just select the datastore you want this to be deployed to.
So configuring your network settings. So one of the things you're going to do
with this virtual appliance when you're deploying it, most of the configuration is done
on the second step. The first step, though, you do name it and you do give it an IP address,
right? So you're going to go ahead and give it an IP address, subnet mask, default gateway,
and DNS servers so they can function on the network because that's how you're going to
connect to it when you do your configuration. Whatever name you assign it, and for the IP
address you gave it to it earlier, you're going to want that to be in DNS. You're going to want
that to already be configured to resolve the name that you gave it to the IP address. That'll be
pretty important as you move forward. You can also choose the port numbers you want to use for HTTP
and HTTPS from here. And it'll say, okay, so here's all the options you configured.
Are you ready to deploy this? Are you happy with those settings? Do you want to go back and change
anything? If you're happy, you can go ahead and say finish and expect this to take you a while.
This is not going to be a quick five-minute little thing. This could take you not so much
because you can go get a sandwich or something, but it will take a while for this to deploy.
So just go ahead and prepare for that. Have a cup of coffee, have a sandwich ready,
and let it go through its process. If it takes a little bit, don't worry about it. If it takes you
30, 40 minutes, don't worry about it. The faster your network is and the faster your storage is,
the faster this will go, but it's still going to take a while. If you're deploying to slow storage
to a single hard drive on some storage somewhere for some reason, if you're deploying over a one
gig network, if you haven't really got into configuring data storage yet and you haven't
got all your virtual networking configured and you're just using a single one gig NIC
to access this first host and you want to get vCenter deployed first and then configure all
these other options like storage and networking and stuff, it's going to be slow. It's going to
take you a while. Give it some time. Give it, like I said, 30, 40 minutes, an hour. Don't be
surprised. If you did take the time to configure some fast storage and you took the time to set up
NIC teaming and you've got some 10 gig NICs configured and things like that, then it obviously
can be a lot quicker. And so here, I'll show you that your stage one configuration is completed.
Once it's gone through that, again, it'll take a bit. So you can go ahead and say,
do you want to continue? Because when you continue, now you do the stage two configuration.
And the stage two configuration is where you go through the vCenter server configuration.
You configure a single sign-on. Do you want to engage in the feedback program with VMware to
let them know about anything going on with your environment to help them improve the product
going forward? And then you can go ahead and click on finish there. So vCenter configuration.
So here, you're going to go in there and configure basically like you want to configure NTP
servers for synchronizing time. That's generally considered a pretty good idea. Hopefully,
you have a time server on your network or you have access to the internet to use something like
ntp.org or something like that. Do you want to – you have SSH access enabled on this?
You don't want to leave it enabled all the time, but maybe you want to enable when this
installation is finished so you can go in there and do some maintenance or some
investigation or something like that. You're going to configure the single sign-on service.
So you're going to give it a single sign-on domain name. You're going to give it a username,
and you're going to want to set up like passwords on there. All right. Those are the big things
there is what's going to be the single sign-on domain name, username, passwords, or do you want
to join an existing single sign-on domain? You'll still want to configure a local one on there as
well just in case, for example, you can't connect to Active Directory or something like that. You
want something to fall back to. So here is the optional. You can choose to engage or not engage
with the feedback program for VMware. And then once you're done with all that,
you can review your setup. You can say finish, and it'll say are you ready to go. You do not
want to interrupt this. You don't want to corrupt that virtual machine. You can say okay, and it'll
go through and deploy all those options you just configured for things like your single sign-on
and your NTP servers and all that kind of stuff will get configured on that vCenter. And when it's
done, it's going to go through and reboot. It will take a little bit, but once it's all done,
you can log into the vCenter client through the web interface and add any ESXi host you have ready
for and things like that. So here you can see it went through, and it completed successfully,
and you can close that, and then you can log into your host. Okay? So that's how you do it through
the GUI. Obviously, it's pretty simple. It does sometimes get a little buggy. I've seen it for
some reason. You go through, you put all your options in, and you click finish, and it fails.
It tells you to go ahead and complete, and it fails. And there's not really necessarily,
sometimes there's a real clear message like oh, I forgot to configure this in DNS or something
like that. But sometimes it's not really clear why, and I've gone through, try it again,
and it failed, and I try it again, you know, with the exact same settings every time,
maybe even screenshot it to make sure I could verify, and then that's how it works,
and there's not really a clear message of why it didn't work the first couple of times.
I don't know if things are just timing out or what, but again, if you're using like a single
one gig adapter and a slow disk and things like that, if it does fail, check all your settings,
verify everything's correct, verify you have, you know, your DNS configured correctly,
and you're entering in the right IPs and names, and that, you know, network connectivity's working,
verify your settings, don't just, you know, try it over and over again. But you might just end up,
after you've verified everything, change nothing, try it again, and it succeeds.
So, you can also do it from the CLI. So, here's just showing you that you'll create this JSON
file, and if the JSON file looks familiar to you when you look at it, it's because it's all
the same things you would have answered had you done through the GUI wizard setting up that way.
So, it's going to want to know all the same things. It's going to want to know network settings and
names and passwords and NTP servers and all that same stuff. You'll have a configuring here,
what single sign-on domain do you want to use, what name are you going to use, all that kind
of stuff you'll put into this JSON file, and then once you configure this JSON file,
you can just go in and, from the command line, do your VCSA deploy, you're going to do an install,
you're going to accept the EULA from here, right, and then you also are going to need to give it
the path to this file that has all the answers for what you're trying to deploy, right. So,
you can either do it through, you know, a GUI through Windows, or you can do it from the command
line on your Windows or your Linux or your Mac systems.