Installing and Configuring VMware vCenter 6.5 (vCSA)

[Music] hey what's going on everybody this is Rob Willis Todd info here and in this video I want to talk about the basic setup and installation of VMware vCenter 6.5 and more specifically I'm going to be talking about the VMware vCenter server appliance or the beast the VCS a is it's more commonly known so the last two videos I've done have covered some of the more basic topics like what is VMware vSphere ESXi and vCenter along with the basic installation and configuration of vSphere ESXi onto a physical host in this video is basically gonna pick up where I left off in the last video so if you missed the previous videos or you're just not familiar with these topics you should definitely go back and check them out before proceeding with this one because it's basically gonna build on top of all of those things we covered there so I have links to that stuff down below and check them out whenever you get a chance if you haven't already alright so moving on let's go ahead and get started alright so the basic idea of what I'm gonna do here today is I've got the ESXi host from the last video where I installed ESXi 6.5 and then I've gone ahead and created an additional ESXi 6.5 host on my network so I now have two ESXi 6.5 posts on my network and so the basic idea of how this is gonna work is I download the vCenter ISO image onto my Windows 10 machine and then from there I'll deploy it onto one of these ESXi hosts and then after it's deployed you can go ahead and configure it and bring ESXi host and start building an inventory and all of that fun stuff so let's go get started with deploying the server appliance ok so now I'm on my Windows 10 machine and like I said I've already gone ahead and download the VCS a ISO image from VMware and I saved it to my desktop so I'm just gonna go ahead and open that folder and here's the ISO image here and I'm just gonna right click and mount and Windows 10 just mount it to a virtual cd-rom drive and from there I can browse the ROM and I'm just gonna go to a VCS a UI installer and pick win32 because I'm on Windows and then double click on the installer Exe and give the Installer a second to launch here so now that it's fully loaded we see that we can install upgrade migrate or restore from a previously saved backup but in this case it's gonna be an entirely new vCenter environment so I'm just going to go with the first option here and click install and the next screen tells you that it's gonna be a two-stage installation the first stage will deploy the appliance in the second stage will be to actually setup the appliance so I'm just going to go ahead and click Next to continue and then after that we see the EULA agreement I'm just gonna check I accept and click Next to continue and then on the next screen we'll need to pick our deployment type so we've got options to keep things simple and keep everything on one server we can go with the default the embedded platform services controller or you can kind of break things out and go with the external ones but in this case we want to keep things as simple as possible and just go with the default and keep everything on one server so I'm just gonna go with the embedded one and go ahead and click Next and so the next screen asks for the appliance deployment target and this is actually gonna be the ESXi host that I want to deploy the vCenter server appliance to so in this case I'm going to go with my 192 168 2.51 the default port of 443 and when you use my root login and it's actually the password that I used are created whenever I installed ESXi and that's it and I'm gonna go ahead and click Next and then it gives me a warning about the the SSL certificate and I'm going to go ahead and click yes to accept that and continue and connect to that host and then the next screen asks for some basic settings about the appliance itself like what do we want the server appliance name to be and then setting the root password and confirming it alright so on the next screen is where we select our deployment size and I'm just gonna go with the default of tiny and I'm gonna stick with the default storage size as well but depending how many hosts and virtual machines you expect to have in your environment you'll need to adjust that accordingly the more hosts in virtual machines you expect to support the more V CPUs memory in storage you're gonna have to provide to the server appliance itself so with this deployment being for a lab like I said I'm gonna go with the tiniest deployment and I'm gonna go ahead and click Next and you may have noticed that the storage required for the tiniest setting is 250 gigabytes and the largest drive or datastore that I have available is only a hundred gigabytes so that's why I'm gonna check this enable thin disk mode and it's only gonna take the amount of space that is required during the installation so that way I can deploy this on a drive that is actually smaller than what it can potentially grow to and that's gonna allow me to install this at this point even though the drives smaller so I'm gonna make sure I check that to enable it and then we'll go ahead and click Next alright so now to configure the default network settings so I'm just going to attach it to the VM Network which is the V switch on that ESXi host and for the system name I'm gonna do so if you see the help it says V Center uses the fqdn or IP address as the system name if you leave the optional fqdn field empty it'll use the IP address as the system name and now that's what I want to do here I don't want to use DNS to connect to the vCenter server I just want to use the IP address so I'm gonna use a completely new IP address here and I'm just gonna go with 192 168 2.53 because my other ESXi hosts are 51 to 52 and I'm just gonna plug in my default subnet mask and my default gateway along with my default DNS servers here and click Next to continue and then on the last page it asks us to review the settings that were configured and click finish to begin deploying the server appliance so this parts gonna take a minute so I'm going to go ahead and skip a little bit to when it's completed and we'll pick up from there all right so the deployment process is just about complete and we'll see that if we click continue it'll just continue on directly into stage two of the deployment process however if we were to exit this Installer prematurely we can also continue on by browsing to HTTPS the IP address we specified for the appliance in specifying the port 54 80 and so I'm just gonna click continue to proceed on to stage two in the first page that we see is the introduction to stage 2 where we're gonna set up the vCenter server appliance and I'm just gonna go ahead and click Next to continue and the next page is going to be the appliance configuration page so this is where you would set the time synchronization mode along with any NTP servers that you want to use and this is also where you can enable SSH access on the vCenter appliance which is a good idea because you're probably gonna end up doing this later on if you get into some more advanced configuration it also says that you're gonna need to say if you're gonna want to run to high availability so I'm just gonna go ahead and enable now enable that now and click Next to continue alright it next up is gonna be the SSO or single sign-on configuration and I'm just gonna go from my SSO domain I'm gonna go with the default there which is vSphere dot local and you see that the user name is going to be administrator and then I'm gonna type in my SSO password and confirm it and then for the site name I'm just gonna use something basic like lab and once I finished up with that I'm just gonna go ahead and click Next to continue and next it asks us if we want to join VMware's customer experience improvement program I'm just gonna uncheck that and click Next to continue alright and finally we're ready to complete and it asked us to review the settings before we hit complete on the wizard and everything looks good so I'm just gonna go ahead and hit finish and it says you will not be able to pause or stop the install from completing once it started click OK to continue or to click cancel to cancel now and I'm just gonna click OK to continue and this process is gonna take a few minutes to complete so I'm just gonna go ahead and skip ahead to what its completed and we'll pick up from there ok so it's been about ten minutes in the setup has just completed so the appliance is now successfully set up and ready to go and we see that it has a few links to help us get started working with the appliance and it's got a link there both of these links will be accessed by specifying HTTP the IP address of the vSphere appliances that we just set up and configured and then if you want to access the web client directly you can just do slash vSphere client and that'll take your radiance to the web client or if you want to go to this getting started page you could just specify the IP address of the appliance itself and that will take you directly to the getting started page and that will have links to the web client as well as the html5 client but at this point we're all done with the installation wizard here and we're ready to start using the appliance so let's go ahead and close out here and get started using the appliance and so as I exit the installer it actually pops up with a Firefox window with the address already pre-populated and we see that we get a your connection is not secure because it's a self-signed certificate so I'm just gonna go ahead and click the advanced button and add the exception and confirm the exception and we see that we get our VMware getting started page here so as you can see there's a few links here there's a link to the web client the flash-based one the html5 client that has partial functionality some vSphere documentation and also a link to what functionality is supported in the html5 client but if you basically always hit this link if you're not sure how to get to the beast or web client or whatever but you're basically just gonna hit the IP address of the appliance itself and that's it and it'll take you to this page and then it has links to all of that stuff and of course if you were using DNS you would just use the DNS name here and it would take you to the same page and so just to show you what I'm talking about real quick let me pull up a new tab here and I'll just type in the IP address of the vCenter server appliance and hit enter and you see it takes me right to the getting started page so you can just always use this as your reference if you need to all right so let's get started with checking out some of these clients so we'll start with the web client or the flash-based one first now this is gonna be the full featured client that supports or has support for all of the vCenter vSphere offerings and products and add-ins and all that stuff but you'll see that we pull it up here by accessing the vSphere dash client and it asks us to log in using the administrator account and specifying our SSO domain which is going to be vSphere dot local and using the password that we created during the install process and I'm just going to give this a second to load here you all right so here you can get the general idea of what the flash client is gonna look like and you'll see that the instance right now is basically empty there's nothing in the inventory but we see all of our basic options here for managing the instance as well as with version 65 we also have the addition of the Update Manager rolled up into the web client now as well and you also do not need a separate bump server for that either so let's go ahead and pull up the html5 client and let that load as well and I'm just gonna give that a second here and once we have both consoles up we'll go ahead and explore them both alright so in here you can get the idea of what the html5 client looks like and it looks a lot like the the HR the flash client but you'll see that there's some things missing some things are a little bit different and overall it has a little bit different look and feel to it and generally I actually prefer the html5 client I think most people do it's a little leaner and cleaner and more responsive and you know what there is one more contour portal that I would have mentioned here and it's that's right they don't actually mention this one on the getting started page but the vSphere appliance itself actually has its own administrative page or portal and you can access that by accessing the IP address of the server appliance and specifying port 54 80 and you'll see that we get the SSL warning just like we did with the other pages because the self signed certificate so I'm just going to add the exception and continue on here but again that address is the IP address of the server and you specify the port 54 80 and you'll see we have our appliance management login here and this one's going to be root and the password that we set during the initial setup of the appliance itself and then we go ahead and login so this one does not use the SSO for the login to it this is just for the a the local credentials for the appliance itself so this is where you'll go to do general maintenance to the vCenter server appliance you can shut it down you can reboot it you can update it you can make changes to the network SSH access all that kind of stuff add users to the local administration gets the statistics CPU memory usage database usage all that kind of stuff basically everything in anything you would need to do to the vCenter server appliance itself and not so much B Center you would do here but it's important to remember that this is this act this portal will actually exists and you'll access it again by specifying HTTP the IP address or DNS name of the vCenter server appliance and specifying port 54 80 and like I mentioned earlier you can't actually update this thing so make sure you log back in regularly and check for updates from the repository and you can just go ahead and install the updates on the fly and you'll see sometimes you'll see changes into the like the webview and stuff like that sometimes the security updates and other stuff like that for the appliance itself but it is a good idea to log in here regularly and check for updates and just check the overall health of your vCenter server appliance and so actually while we're on that subject let's see let's go ahead and login I'm gonna log into the ESXi hypervisor that is running the vCenter server appliance and let's take a look and see what it looks like for the appliance at the the normal vm console so you can get an idea of what that looks like all right so again I'm on the the ESXi hypervisor that is running the vCenter server appliance so we're actually going to look at it like we're gonna see it from a VM perspective so we see the server appliance here and I'm just gonna right click and open my VMware console so I can see what would be on the screen if I was actually like physically sitting in front of this and I'm just gonna launch the remote console all right and so what do you know it looks exactly like an ESXi hypervisor looks like whenever it's fully booted up except instead of the gray and yellow it's gray in blue and then it also has some information about the appliance itself along with some information and URLs and stuff on how to manage it and then we see at the bottom we have the same f2 to customize f12 to enter the shutdown startup options but that's it so I'm to go ahead and close out of there so like I said we have our maintenance portal which is accessed by the IP address of the server appliance and specifying that port of 54 80 and then we also have the vSphere web client which is accessed by the IP address of the server appliance slash vSphere client and this is used for general everything with vCenter that you're gonna do and then we also have the html5 client which is similar to the vSphere web client but it can also be used for your normal day-to-day but that's going to be accessed by the IP address of the vSphere appliance / UI and if all else fails and you get lost you can always just go to the IP address of the vCenter server appliance itself and that'll take you to the getting started page so with all that being said let's go ahead and jump into the bestir web client and let's get started building out our data center we'll get some hosts added into here and get some PM setup and i'll show you what this is all about so I'm just gonna right click and create a new data center and for my data center name I'm just gonna name it lab and then I'm gonna click OK and you'll see that it'll show our data center up here on the left-hand menu but you'll notice that there's no hosts in our data center so let's go ahead and right-click on the data center itself and I'm gonna add a host and this is gonna be an ESXi host so I'm gonna use the IP address of this is actually gonna be the ESXi host I created in the previous video I'm just gonna add that IP address in there and click Next and then I'm gonna type in my username and password and those are just the normal user name and password for that ESXi host and I'm gonna click yes to accept a certificate and connect to the host and we see that it automatically picks up the virtual machines that are already on the host and this is actually the same host hosting the the server appliance and it's gonna click Next and I'm just gonna leave it on the evaluation license and hit next and for lockdown mode I'm just gonna leave that as the default of disabled and for the VM location I'm just gonna go with the default of lab you'll see that was already selected here I'm just gonna go ahead and click Next and then it says ready to complete and we see it picked up everything correctly so I'm just going to go ahead and click finish and you'll notice that it actually shows up as disconnected right here but then down at the tasks the recent tasks you'll see that it's still working on it and up there cuz it just completed but so now I'm actually gonna go ahead and add an additional host into the V Center here and I'm just gonna follow the exact same steps it's just gonna be like the previous one except this one's gonna be dot 52 instead of 51 but it's another ESXi 6.5 host that i've already set up and like i said i'm just gonna follow the same steps but i'm just gonna go ahead and skip through these really quickly here all right so at this point we have a basic vCenter server appliance set up we have a few hosts added into our data center so let's go ahead and take a look around and see what we've got going on here so you notice the menu on the left hand side we can expand out a host and then select virtual machines that are located on that host so say the doc 51 host here we'll notice that's got three virtual machines on it so if I click on the Ubuntu one we notice that it looks very similar to how it looked managing it on the ESXi host directly so we've got all those same basic settings but we've also got some additional functionality added here but you'll notice like it we got the same menu layout here we still have our actions but and but here's where things start to get interesting so while we still have all the regular options power guest OS snapshots console and all that it will know some additional menu items here like migrate clone template fault tolerance update manager down to bottom and this is all additional functionality that comes with vCenter and you wouldn't see these items normally exposed in the ESXi manager that you wait when managing a host directly and another thing you'll notice here is that we have also got multiple ESXi hosts that we can manage through this one console here where normally you would have to log into each host directly and manage it through its own individual console so now we can centrally manage all of our ESXi hosts so what does this all mean exactly well now that the hypervisors are connected together by a central resource we can now do some advanced stuff between them like move virtual machines so take this dot 51 hypervisor here and the abun to one divert chill machine now it's actually currently powered off but what I'm gonna do is just right click and click on migrate and then I can actually move this machine from one hypervisor to another and I'm just gonna click on change both compute resource and storage and go ahead and click Next and then for my compute resource I'm gonna select the other hypervisor that's on the environment the dot 52 and I'm gonna go ahead and click Next and then it's gonna ask me to select the storage that I wouldn't move the virtual machine to on the destination hypervisor and I'm just going to go ahead and select the 40 gig local and click Next and then lastly it'll ask me to select a network that when you use on the destination hypervisor and this is gonna be the network that I want to connect the virtual machine to and I'm just going to go with the default selection there and go ahead and click Next and then click finish to begin the migration process and that's just gonna take a second to finish up there but there are some ways where you can even do this where the virtual machine is turned on with no downtime but of course there are some restrictions around that but you can see that it actually already completed the migration and we can see that our a bunch of one machine is now moved to a completely different hypervisor so we just moved a virtual machine from one physical host to a completely different physical host on completely different storage but it's gonna run exactly the same as it did the hardware is allocated to it is all exactly the same it still has the same amount of V CPUs memory all of that stuff it'll still use the same IP address said it was using if a static IP address was set and it should have access to the same network cuz both of these hypervisors on the same network but that's it we just completely moved a virtual machine and now say if this was a bigger hypervisor and we needed to give this virtual machine more resources now we can we don't have to rebuild it on a completely different host or anything like that it's crazy we just completely move this thing just like that in a matter of moments all right so now let's try something a little bit different one of the other things that makes VMware vCenter so useful is the ability to clone virtual machines so let's go ahead and power off the bun to one virtual machine real quick and then let's go ahead and take the bun to to machine up here and I'm just gonna right click and I'm gonna go to clone and then clone to virtual machine and now this is going to make a complete duplicate of this virtual machine and it asked me to enter a name for the new virtual machine and I'm just gonna do a bun 2 - 3 and I'm just gonna select my lab and click Next and then for the compute source I'm going to do the the dot 52 and then we'll click Next and for storage I'm just gonna select that 40 gig local and click Next and then that's it I'm just gonna go ahead and click Next and finish and then that's it it goes and begins the cloning process and that's all there is to it we just completely cloned an entire virtual machine and now it's on and it's also on an entirely different hypervisor as well but now we can go ahead and powered on and it'll have it'll be an exact copy of that virtual machine it'll have the same V CPUs the same settings the same memory in the exact same hard disc so anything that was installed on there will be installed on this one as well so if a Bunter was installed on it I actually didn't install it yet it was just an empty shell for an about to install but if it was installed it would just go ahead and power on and boot Ubuntu and as long as the static IP address wasn't set it would also pick up a IP address through DHCP and I'm you'd also want to make sure that the host name was changed inside the OS but other than that we have a completely new and additional virtual machine on the network and that's it and you can go ahead and you can power it on and you can console into it and you can do everything you would normally do with a virtual machine without having to install from scratch and configure the virtual machine and then boot the operating system and configure it and all that all right and one last thing is I want to show the html5 client real quick now that we got some stuff populated in be Center but you'll see that it basically looks nearly identical to the the flash based web client it's a little bit cleaner overall and its design and everything it's a little bit of snappier to respond but overall it looks very similar you'll notice some things aren't available like the update manager isn't available in the html5 client but your right-click menus will work basically the same your action menus and know that you can still do your migrations your clones and all that kind of stuff and I think that's what I'm going to wrap this one this is the third and final video in my VMware series that I've been working on and I hope you guys found it informal and useful and and you know found some stuff to take away from it and hopefully it get you into using VMware ESXi and P Center and honestly like the whole reason I did this is because I just love working with these products and because it honestly makes my life easier or it did make my life easier as a sysadmin administrator because it was just I didn't have to really spend my time troubleshooting the virtual machines I could get to the issues that I really should have been looking at and it's just they're great products to work with and I hope it helps you guys get into it and I hope you get some get you running your own hypervisors at home and with that being said I hope you guys enjoyed the video and as always thanks for watching

Channel: Rob Willis

Views: 56,808

Keywords: VMware, vSphere, ESXi, vCenter, 6.5, VM, Virtual Machine, Web Console, Install, How to, VCSA, Appliance

Id: uW6qanEATrc

Length: 25min 27sec (1527 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 01 2017