Welcome back to vSphere 8 in the real world. Now we're going to discuss vCenter Server Management Interface.
So once you've got done deploying your vCenter Server, you're probably going to want to log in and access that vCenter Server.
So you can log into the vCenter Server just by going to HTTPS and then the IP address or the fully qualified domain name of the vCenter Server.
So for example, if you did configure a admin at vSphere.local account when you deployed vCenter Server, you could log into its IP address,
you know, HTTPS colon slash slash IP address, administrator at vSphere.local, and then that password, and you can log into it.
If you've already set up AD integration, you're logging into this, so it's not your first time to start logging into it,
you could use your Windows AD domain credentials for logging in here also then.
Now this is not for accessing the vCenter Server to manage vSphere, meaning to manage your ESXi host and to manage your VMs and to manage DRS and HA.
This is to log into the vSphere client for managing the virtual appliance itself.
So this is the vCenter Server Management Interface, not the vSphere Management Interface, all right?
To be clear, again, the vSphere Management Interface is for managing vSphere, it's for managing the host, it's for managing the virtual machines and all the things related to that.
The vCenter Server Management Interface, this is for managing the vCenter Server itself, like the IP address of the vCenter Server, for example.
And for that, you're going to go to HTTPS colon slash slash either the IP address or the fully qualified domain name of the vCenter Server.
So the same thing you would have accessed to manage vSphere, but you're going to add a port number of colon 5480.
So that 5480 means we're going to go into a different web interface, right, that's going to allow us to manage this virtual appliance versus our vSphere environment.
So the login to this, normally the credentials are going to be root and then whatever password you configure for root.
You can also create additional accounts for managing this, but by default, the first time you're going to log in with root and whatever that root password is.
So as you can see, now we are in the interface for managing the vCenter virtual appliance.
And the first thing we have here is monitor, so we can see how much CPU is being used by this virtual appliance, how much memory, disk, if we're getting errors on something, right?
We can see all the utilization on there.
So from here, we can say, oh, wow, you know, the CPU usage on this vCenter Server is really high.
When I deployed it, I deployed a tiny, think I'm only going to have three or four hosts, but I've actually ended up deploying 15 hosts and I have all these VMs and I just way undersized my vCenter Server.
So maybe I need to either, you know, bump up the CPU and the RAM on this, or maybe I want to redeploy vCenter and, you know, size it correctly and migrate a bunch of things over.
It depends on how much I've got configured and how complicated that would be for me, right?
So access, how do I want to allow access?
This isn't necessarily saying what level of access, it's not permissions, it's saying how do I want it to be accessed.
So, for example, do I want to allow SSH access?
Do I want to allow access to the DCUI, which is going to be like basically console access to the virtual appliance?
Do we want to allow CLI access?
Do we want to enable the bash shell, right?
So how do we want to allow this device to be managed is what they're trying to configure, or, you know, options are giving you right here with that access.
So it's not saying what you can and cannot do, it's saying how you can access it to do those things.
So networking, this is where I'm going to configure the network adapter with an IP address, subnet mask, default gateway, all that configuration there.
If for some reason I can't, you know, access the internet from it or something like that, do I configure the gateway right?
Do I configure DNS right?
You know, what's going on with that?
I can look at those under network here.
So firewall, I can go in there, I can create, edit, delete any firewall rules that I may need.
Maybe you have certain rules about accessing certain subnets or access from certain subnets if you want to configure firewall rules right here.
It probably is often will be done on your actual physical, you know, Palo firewall or something like that.
But maybe you have a policy that says local firewalls must be enabled and must have certain configurations for maybe for various levels of certification and things like that that you require from your organization.
So time, here you can go in there and say if you want to enable NTP and configure the options like that on there.
So services, you know, what services do you want to go in there?
Here you can go in and start and stop different services or if a service isn't working quite right, you're in a problem, it's not responding, something like that,
you can restart a service from here.
So this is kind of just services, you know, applet on a Windows box, very similar.
So update, so here what's going to happen is you can go in and you can tell the check for updates.
It'll show you what updates are available.
So maybe you're running version 8.0 and you want to move to 8.0 update 1.
What will happen is you can check for updates here if 8.1 is available or 8.0 update 1 is available.
You can download it.
You can deploy it here to vCenter and once you've deployed the update to vCenter here,
then you can go into the vSphere management interface and you can check your host update manager and you should see that same update available there.
You cannot update the host until you've updated vSphere.
You always update your vCenter server first and then you update your host.
So from update here is where you can get that update to update the vCenter server.
Syslog, it can be configured from there, pretty obvious right here.
We can set up, we want to configure 40 for syslog servers and remote syslog server views.
So backups, this last option here is where you can configure backups.
You can configure a backup schedule when you want things to backup and you can say where you want them to backup to.
It can't backup to the local appliance.
It's going to have to have a backup target configured.
The target can be HTTPS, FTP, NFS, SMB.
I'm pretty sure there's an option on there too.
You can choose different network targets where you want the backups to go, but it has to have a target to go to.
You can't backup to the device itself and then try to use SCP to copy it off later or something like that.
You've got to point to a backup target.
So you should have something configured for the backups to go to before you come to here and try to backup.
All right, before we wrap this up, let's go ahead and go to our demo and let's look at the vSphere appliance.
So here we are in our vCenter server management server, not the vSphere management, but vCenter.
And we can tell because we have this 5480 at the end of our address for vCenter.
So I'm going to go ahead and log in as root here.
All right, so when you first log into here, this is what you're going to see, right?
It tells you a quick summary of the system.
You know, if there's any alerts you need to be aware of, most things look good.
There's an alert on the memory on there.
Appliance is running low on memory.
Maybe I need to go in there and bump up the memory in the virtual appliance.
Since there's not really much in there, I really shouldn't have too much of a problem with RAM.
Under monitor, I can say, well, why do I have a memory problem?
I can go in there and look down here and say, oh, because I'm using almost 100% of the RAM I have configured on here.
Here's my CPU usage.
That's not too bad in general.
It's getting a little high right here, but maybe it'll drop down here pretty soon.
But the memory usage has been high the entire time, and high memory usage can also increase your CPU usage, too.
So that might be, you know, indicative of a problem.
We can look at our disks, and you can see vCenter creates a lot of different hard drives.
There's ones for the operating system and different logs go to different places.
Here's one for auto-deploy, right?
I can look at my network.
Here I can select different services that are running on there, right?
I can see, you know, any kind of network performance issues on those.
My databases and space looks just fine.
Don't have too much issue there because this is a brand-new vCenter.
Again, not much in there, so I don't have to worry about that.
And then, of course, any kind of logs.
I can go in there and create a support bundle from here and send this to VMware if I have any, you know, problems, you know, something.
This is one of the first things they usually ask for.
When I open a support ticket with VMware, I now just right away go in and get support bundles and send them right over before I even submit the ticket or when I submit the ticket,
you know, brand-new because I know they're going to ask for it, and that just saves me from, you know,
an interaction where they're going to send me, not just asking for it, it's already there.
So here is that access.
I can say if I want to allow, you know, SSH access, DCUI, console CLI, bash shell access.
I can go in and make changes to that just by going to edit, and I can turn things on and off.
Networking.
Here's where I can go in there and change the IP address or gateway or whatever's on here.
Click on edit for that adapter.
Here I can see my host name, my DNS, right, my NIC0 information.
Right here I'm using DHCP.
I can say I want it to be static.
In a real production environment, this would be a static configuration, not DHCP.
Firewall settings.
So I want to go in there and look at any firewall settings.
I want to create or add firewall rules.
I can do that from here.
Time, I want to configure NTP.
Here's the time zone I'm in, and do I want to go in there and enable NTP?
Let's say I want to enable NTP, and then I can say, you know, the name of the time zone,
pool.ntp.org or something like that.
I can also say I want it to sync up with the host.
Because it's a VM, I can say just use the time that's on the host, and the host can use NTP, right?
And then my VM should still be, you know, pretty much the same.
Under services, here's where I can go in and stop or restart services.
If I have a service that's causing some kind of a problem or, you know, giving me a problem,
I can go in there and find it, and just restart individual services from here.
All I got to do is go in there, select the service, and I can say if I want to start it.
If it's already started, I can restart it or stop it.
Update.
This is where you probably go kind of the most often, because you probably don't go in here a ton.
Hopefully your logs are going to a syslog server.
If you don't have any issues, you can get to your logs and make sure you don't have issues with your syslog server.
So if you are coming into here, a lot of times it's because you want to check for updates or push out updates.
You know, you know, the newest 8.0 update 3 just got released recently,
so you want to update to that most current version.
You can come into here.
It will, you can tell it to check for updates.
Right now, we don't have a good internet connection here, so it's probably going to run a little slow.
If I find the update, I can click on it and push out the vCenter update.
Then I can go in and update my hosts.
Under administration, I can set password policies and say if my password is set to expire or not.
Here's where I can go in there and configure my logging.
I can configure my syslog server here, right, the address, if I'm using TLS or not, what port number I want to go to.
And then the last thing is this is where you would go in and configure and run a backup.
You can configure backups to run, or you can do a manual backup now.