Complete installation guide for VMware vCenter 8 (VCSA)

hello today we'll be looking at installing VMware vcenter 8. so this is also called vcsa specifically what it is is a virtual machine that gets added to your V sphere environment and it will actually run multiple hosts so if you want to manage at a larger scale so if you don't have a single server single host specifically I'm not talking about VMS here about physical hosts well you probably want to install the vcenter server so the way we do that is to get the iso and to proceed with the installation there's a few tricks along the way so we'll take a look at that now the latest version version 8.0 a as of of course this recording and this will go every month every month and a half every few months you'll get a new version Sometimes they come out because of security concerns this one I know the a has something that it changes for security reasons now there's from functionality point of view there's a bit of a change from seven to eight you'll see the look and feels a little different but overall it keeps being the same old uh Management console that you're used to and even though you know the graphics a little different you're still going to be comfortable if you've used uh 7.0 so let's go ahead and jump right into it now you can always go to the websites and read the release notes or to change logs for those of you who are more Technical and you can always see what the new versions bring once it is installed you can go into this vcenter and get it to update itself that's a whole different subject and you could look I believe we have a video on that for version seven but it is essentially the same thing there's an update button on there that you can go and it will retrieve the latest upgrades and you can take a look to see how it affects it now occasionally when you do upgrading things in the future it will restart I think I'd be good to give little note on there when you do that the vcenter what's the system once it does manage a bunch of hosts can be upgraded can be restarted without affecting the hosts meaning if you have a bunch of virtual machines you have sound environment perhaps that runs 24 7. last thing you want to do is risk turning anything off or rebooting especially if you've got a you know people working around the another world for example that are accessing things you don't want to pull the plug on anything at any moment especially not if it's unplanned and it's a surprise so if the vcenter the only thing that it would affect I shouldn't say the only thing I mean one of the examples is the backups for example if you're using the vcenter and you're using veeam to back up and it's connecting to the vcenter as opposed to the direct host obviously while you're rebooting it's not available that might trigger something so but it's very limited in effect to my knowledge of course if you have monitoring applications if you have any of those things they would be subject to being affected or triggering alarms and so forth if you restart a vcenter but that aside from a user point of YouTube database running Microsoft SQL whatever it is in a VM it's going to keep working not affected by this so I thought I'd make that very clear by the way if you like these videos please please give us a thumbs up and of course subscribe that really helps out a small Channel like ours and we so appreciate it thank you so much for all the people who send in their their comments and so forth below I do read those and I do try to respond to them in a timely fashion always appreciate all the ideas for other videos as well so let's jump right into it so what I've done is logged into the the machine here so what I have is I have two machines Two Hosts and they're both pretty much the same they're both running on Dell are 640s and I've got a bit of storage inside of each one nothing huge nothing very complicated in this one I've gone out of my way and I've created a basically a second uh basically Nick here and I've gone ahead and created another airport group and so I've got another virtual switch that I've called v-switch so again this is not going to affect any of this I'm just trying to give you a bit of a heads up I've got no virtual machines in here and I'm going to be using this really just for testing and just to show you around the new version 8. so let's go ahead since the point here is to install it so I've got my host IP address DHCP on there so by the way usually you want to make sure that is a static IP address so what I've got is the iso right here if you can see it here on the side and the iso what I'm going to do is I'm going to double I'm going to click right and I'm going to click on Mount and that will do is it will bring me up a let's do this here so this will bring me here so I'm going to go ahead and use the user interface so go here go to Windows 32 and there's the installer and that's all there is to it now if you've watched any of my previous videos thank you for that but specifically if you've watched any of my vcsa or vcenter videos one of the things that I usually say is make sure that you have a DNS server active in the environment because it will make your the installation a lot easier and so forth now one of the things that you can do if you don't have DNS servers you can cheat little and you can use the host file so the host file is under uh let's see it's under Windows system 32 drivers Etc and you have a file called posts in there that you can go and add an IP address and the name of the machine so let's see if we can pull this off today so I'm going to click on install and really all install does is it pops this up so let's go ahead and close a few things to get less distraction so what we want to do today is we want to do an installation and really we're just following through this wizard it's quite quite simple and we're going to go ahead and say next and it's going to say okay except yes and now it's going to ask us for the name of the esxi host so I'm just going to go ahead and use the one that I just was logged into and in my case I'm going to put in the password so I'm going to say okay I'm trusted that's fine in this case this is a lab environment so I could certainly get away with not worrying about too many of the things on there now we're going to give it a name usually what I do is I call it vcsa let's say eight or actually you know what um that that should actually match whatever it is that you put in your host file so here's one of the things that I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the host file I'll just give me a moment here I'm going to bring that up to show you what's in my host file okay so my host file has this right now so vcsa8 and I'm pointing it to an IP address now I did this fire so that again I don't have a DNS server running right now because I've got no VMS I have no Windows Server I have no Linux servers I have nothing right now so this brand new lab environment so what I'm going to do is I'm going to use this information here now you're gonna have to set a root password do keep in mind that the root password expires after 90 days I do have another video on that if you ever find out too late that you didn't change your passwords in time and it locks you out so please be sure to watch that on how to recover that in case it gets lost so I'm going to go ahead and make up a password for this and of course you write it down uh somewhere hopefully somewhere encrypted so that you do remember now this is how much space this will consume so in case you thought hey this is going to be really small uh you can't run this off a USB key you can't run this off at an SD card you really need to have you know enough rooms you'll see even though the tiny look at the memory that it takes So Gone are the days that you want to have a very minimal machine running a whole bunch of stuff at this point so from Storage Point of View it's 580 gigs and this again is how many VMS you can hold and how many hosts so in our case we're going to have three hosts for some of our lab work here and um so the tiny is fine and you can see how that starts to get quite large compared to I mean if you're going to go back all the way back to you know version five let's say uh the the vcenter used to be very small and it's just growing with fine so I'm just going to go ahead and do next whereas I want to send it here and this is how much free space I have so I'm good now if I want to I could use thin disk mode what that will do is it will not pre-allocate the space to the VM or in this case to the vcenter and so I'm going to go ahead and select this so we're not right now we're not installing it on a cluster we're not doing anything fancy so we're just going to go ahead and do next and this is where I get uh okay so I can select a VM Network that's already predefined so I'm going to go ahead and give it an IP well usually you want to put an aesthetic IP in this case when you do okay so here we go and we're going to go ahead and give it the address that we just saw here so I need this to match so it's two five five two five five two five five zero and the default gateway again this is a lab environment and this is where I've got a DNS server so I don't actually have at the end us here but that should work just check there's nothing below next and if we don't have a DNS or we don't have an entry in the host file this is where it would fail so it's basically going to go through various stages and without the DNS at some point it just kind of Fizzles out and gives you an error I don't remember the error offhand but a lot of the problems can be solved if you have a DNS server go ahead and say continue stage two we're saying it up next okay time synchronization um these are depending on what you're going to be doing from a functionality point of view you might want to have the SSH enabled at first if you want to use um go and type in some commands for example do anything fancy we're going to leave that off for security reasons leave it off if you ever need to have SSH access on turn it on use it and turn it back off that's the ideal situation time synchronization I mean you could basically put in an ntp here usually I put sin since it's just a lab environment we're just going to leave that off but I would suggest putting that in if it's going to be used for any length of time let's go ahead and next so here we go so singles ion what we're going to do is we are going to give it a name so administrator I'm actually going to leave it to vsphere.local now this is again a test environment we need to put in a password a lot of different passwords now this is a different password from the root password okay so I'm going to go ahead and say next and this is a lot I'm going to use off here's my information and we're going to do next click OK and we wait yet again so doing this entire process maybe I should have said this on the onset is probably going to take you I don't know we're about 30 minutes right now and we're not done So eventually 45 minutes to an hour to get this up and running and that's if you've already got DNS set up and you you know already have all these answers ready but um it's not too hard I think you'll you'll find that apart from the waiting aspect which is a little slow but I think overall it's not too hard of a process to get this up and running so there we go we have successfully done stage two and what it shows us now is how to get into it so you'll notice here that there is um basically the right IP address on the bottom and it's Port 443 so let's go ahead and do that so we're gonna go ahead and go right into it now you have to click on Advanced and unsafe and here we go this is going to be our first look of the new vcenter so let's go ahead and log in try not to get our hopes up too high that this will be so we said we'll be centered on local I believe I left that and make sure this works now of course we won't have anything connected to it yet so we'll have to do that see what this looks like exciting in here okay you have some alarms there's no nothing running on here all right so I have no licenses in here of course I mean that'd be something you would do and if we go here there is nothing below it so we can go ahead and by the way so yeah always make sure that you've got the latest build if you're going to set it up get the latest and greatest while you're doing it so what we're going to do now is go ahead and take a quick look around I mean there's there's really nothing in here so under configuring this is where you go into licensing and you would put in your information there if you don't then at some point uh as of this writing you know like what 60 days later 59 days you will have a surprise where things will just stop working so put that in and let's take a look so there's no host there's no there's nothing on here so what we want to do is we want to go here right click see and we're going to click and we're going to create a new data center since this is brand new there's nothing in here so we're gonna have to start from the beginning so create a data center which we will have to call well I can call it data center that's fine okay so now I have a data center all right so I'm starting to have the ability to go and add hosts if we wanted to and we wanted to have clustering or we want to have something else in fact I think since I've not done this before but if we had just a host we would just click on host and you would type in the information we're going to go ahead and install or rather connect this to some hosts so you right click you say add hosts right here and go ahead and type in the IP address of the one that we are currently on 137 I believe is the one that we are currently on and there's like a period there I just noticed that okay do next it's going to ask you for the username and the password so I'm going to go ahead and do this type in root and the password now it's going to store certificate yes and it's showing us which version it's running on Adele okay next now we don't have a license so we're just going to skip this for 60 days a lot lockdown mode I'm going to leave this off at location well there's only one data signal is literally just here so add to complete finish and now we have one host connected so we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna connect a second hose and just to show you one 139 is the other one so we're gonna go ahead do next and let's go ahead and put this in we'll take this properly in all right next yes next and there are no virtual machines in here so of course there's really nothing too exciting if you go in here I mean there's nothing else to select just do ready and do finish and now you should get two of them here are my two posts and again they are well one of them has this vcsa installed the other one has nothing so this is what it looks like and at that point we could go and manage things and see some information so if you wanted to you know see some information performance point of view this is what it looks like um it's pretty responsive I mean it's showing no no alarms you could go and allocate things you could see their health so there's lots of uh I mean there's no uh well actually there is a VM here you can click on VM and you can see rvm click on it here and then you can see information on that VM and that's roughly what it looks like so we have successfully installed vcsa also known as vcenter and as you can see here this manages multiple hosts now keep in mind if you have something like an essential version then this vcenter if it had that license would only be able to control three physical hosts now keep in mind that each host depending on the size of your machine of course how many processors you know cores and so forth amatram and this space um you could have multiple virtual machines underneath here in fact this is you know traditionally what happens and the reason why people do this is to be able to optimize the hardware so then you would have them here now have the other abilities once we set this up meaning that at some point if we wanted to we could do things like you know migrate the machine from one to the other so from one physical host to the other and so forth so that's about it in a nutshell um I mean this is what it looks like you can look at your different data stores you can look at you know your VMS your networks your there's only one data center it shows you Two Hosts there's only one VM for the whole thing apart from that I have folders which we're not going to use here from the configuration point of view this is where you can go and modify certain things if you did not put for example the ntp the time server you can go and you know add this now if you needed to you could also from security settings make sure that you turn off any services that you do not require for a security point of view if it's not in use like SSH for example turn it off it'll make your life so much easier and um it's showing here some plugins last but not least uh the only thing I'll mention as well is this update here where you could go in here and basically check to see if there are updates on there and apply them as required so it is a good practice to keep these up to date I usually wait a little bit when it comes off unless I'm aware of something uh so monumentally wrong from a you know utilization point of view like something will fit purple screen or blue screen uh just stop in other words on you then I would probably go ahead and apply it usually I've got a test server that's why I've got these labs and I would test them out first the other things from a security point of view if you know there's a breach I've seen a huge breach a while ago an I.T firm called me up and wanted my assistance because they had multiple multiple physical hosts that were all hacked into to be fair those were all still running five points something which you know someone somewhere should have decided to update um you know to a more recent version but that aside the point is when you find out that there are some security breaches on certain versions either because the service has been left open and there's a bug in that service and someone's figured out how to get into it well you may need to apply that patch that security update very quickly that is a very valid reason to do so on the flip side sometimes and if you go and look at the different builds for the version 7 for example you will see that there's a couple of builds from VMware that were pulled that were taken back that were you know basically taken right off because they had a major bug and it took a little while for the bug in some cases to materialize like I.E um you reboot a couple times and all of a sudden the machine won't reboot that can be a huge problem and a game changer if you've got an environment where you run 24 7 you can't afford to have that and what's unfortunate with some of these problems is sometimes it will take days for someone to figure out there's a major problem with the release so I guess in theory I'd like to be prudent I'd like to do my own testing I like to wait a little bit to see you know how it reacts and if there's anything in the forearms and if I hear of any problems with the updates because sometimes it does break something unfortunately sometimes they hurry out these updates you know because they have to plug something there's a hole somewhere and they're rushed to do so might bring something else it's not usually the problem these are very stable in general so they are the exception to the rule but still so I'm Bob Palo and CTO Bob I hope this was informative and useful to some of you out there if it was leave some comments below and of course don't forget to you know like And subscribe this video if you've made it this far congratulations you can also visit us at www.cttobob.com and we're so appreciative we'll see you in the next video thanks for watching

Channel: Bob Pellerin

Views: 10,616

Keywords: Technology, Bob Pellerin, CTOBOB, vmware, esxi 8, vcenter, vcenter 8, vcsa, vcsa 8, dell, PE640, PE650, poweredge

Id: om_ul6tIvKc

Length: 20min 38sec (1238 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 16 2023