vSphere 6.5 - How to install and configure VMware vCenter 6.5 Appliance

hello and welcome to the fifth admin tutorial of YouTube channel today we're going to be looking at a walkthrough installation of the new VMware vCenter 6.5 appliance in this tutorial we'll cover the following areas installing the appliance the admin interface creating an Active Directory identity sauce and setting up some admin permissions creating folders data centers and clusters and mostly I'll touch on some power CLI commands this tutorial is designed to get you up and running with Lisa at 6.5 along with two ESXi 6.5 hosts we will look at some of the more advanced features of VC 6.5 in later tutorials but for now let's get started here I've downloaded our ISO image of the vCenter server appliance I'm going to right click on it and select mount from here I'm going to head into VCS a UI installer go to win32 and double click on install exe once the install is loaded you can see that we have four options we have install upgrade migrate and restore in this tutorial we're going to be installing a new vCenter server appliance so I'm going to select the first option here now the installations broken up into two stages stage one is the actual deployment of the appliance which is what we're going through here with these nine steps on the left hand side followed by stage two which is the actual setup of the appliance we'll accept the License Agreement here we have two options to deploy the vCenter appliance we can either deploy it with an embedded platform services controller or we can install it with the platform services controller sitting externally I'm going to be selecting the first one with the embedded platform services controller and we'll move on to step number three in step number three it's asking us where we wish to deploy the vCenter server appliance I'm going to type in the ESXi host name followed by the root user and password we'll click yes to the certificate warning now in step number four is asking us for the virtual machine name of our vCenter server the name I'm going to use is decent sixty-five and we'll type in the root password for our appliance and confirm the password in step number five we have some deployment size options the table below highlights the amount of V CPUs and memory given to the vCenter server appliance and how many hosts and virtual machines that deployment side supports we also have the option to increase the storage size if we wish to keep a longer retention of stats events alarms and tasks changing the storage size to large or extra large changes the storage column within the table below select which one best meets your needs however for my lab I'm going to be selecting default storage size so step number six I'm going to select the data store that I wish to install my vCenter server appliance on to my data stores name is technology 1815 - NFS one and we'll click Next in step eight we're going to be configuring the network settings of the appliance the name of the network that I wish to connect the appliance to is called home lab internal will use ipv4 the IP assignment is static the system name vCenter six five pm lab local the IP address that I'm going to be assigning is 192 168 dot one dot one nine seven subnet mask is slash 24 which is 255.255.255.0 and the default gateway for this network is 192 168 dot one dot one only have one DNS server which is my Active Directory domain controller and that IP address is 192 168 1 dot 1 0 1 now before I click Next I just want to make sure that this host name is set up in DNS if I head on over to my ad server you can see that I've created a host record for vCenter 65 with the IP address 192.168.1.1 97 and this provides me with a forward lookup also have the reverse lookup for this host configured as well as you can see here for the pointer record now we'll go back to our installation and we'll click next step number 9 gives us a summary of all the settings that we've entered in so far if you're happy with these settings you can click on finish otherwise you can simply click back and make some changes I'm going to go ahead and click finish and the deployment of the vCenter server appliance has begun okay we've now successfully deployed the vCenter server appliance so that completes stage number one and now we'll proceed over to stage number two we'll click continue and just illustrate here that we're up to stage number two setting up the vCenter server appliance here we're going to set up our NTP servers and time synchronization you do have two options though you can synchronize with the ESXi host or against NTP servers I'm going to be selecting the NTP service and for my NTP servers I'm going to be entering in four addresses and when you're entering multiple addresses just make sure that they're separated by a comma next we have an option to enable SSH access to the appliance I'm going to turn this on for my one and we'll move forward to step number three in step number three we're going to be setting up our SSO configuration for my episode domain name I'm going to be sticking with the traditional vSphere Local however you can make this whatever you like to see here that my username is administrator and I'll be entering in an SSO password and we'll confirm the password for site name we're going to be sticking with the default - site however you can also make this whatever site name you like and we'll move along to step number four in step number four we have the option to join the VMware customer experience improvement program for the lab I'm just going to uncheck that and in step number five we have a summary of all of our settings that we've previously entered if you're happy with it we can click on finish and we'll be presented with a warning which states that you will not be able to pause or stop the install from completing once it started so we're okay with that so therefore I'm going to click on OK and the appliance setup is now in progress okay stage two has now successfully completed and that concludes the installation of the vCenter server appliance you can see two important links down here one is to the VCA web client and the other one is to do a getting started page next up will be taking a look at the vCenter admin interface and what options are available to us within there once we're finished with the admin interface we'll be logging into the vSphere web client now we're going to access the vCenter 6.5 server appliance management site you can access this site by typing in the fqdn of your vCenter server followed by point 5 4 8 0 login as root and enter in your password the first screen displays the overall health status along with any messages from the system it also displays the single sign-on status in the top right hand corner we can back up to the appliance create a support bundle reboot and shutdown clicking on backup we have a few options in regards to what protocol we use if you wish to use HTTP I highly recommend using HTTP file server or HFS for short this is a lightweight program that creates a HTTP server on your PC laptop or server and becomes an excellent candidate for a backup destination this is the URL for the HTTP file server if you wish to use this option however in this demo we'll be using FTP as the backup destination our FTP location is the IP address followed by forward slash when you're using port 21 FTP username is the Center 65 and I'll enter in my password we also have the option to encrypt the backup data but now that we've got all of our information entered here we'll click Next we have two parts that we can backup we have the common part which consists of inventory and configuration we also have the such events alarms and tasks part which contains historical data we're going to be backing up both of those and we'll click Next the last part of the backup wizard displays a summary of your settings and we'll click finish to start the backup once the backup is complete you can click on ok so now that we've got a full backup of our vCenter server appliance if for whatever reason we do lose our vCenter server we can simply restore it by running through the vCenter server appliance installer within the Installer we can click on the restore option so if you remember during the installation there were two stages stage 1 performs the full installation and stage 2 with the configuration so the difference with the restore is that in stage 2 we actually perform the restore from our recent backup I'm going to minimize the Installer and we'll move on to the access option within the access tab we can enable or disable the ssh login and bash shell the root user has automatic access to the bash shell however enabling bash shell access allows any other user besides root to access the shell if we have to take into our vCenter server and we log in as root we can simply access the bash shell by typing shell ok I'm going to exit out of the SSH window and we'll move on to networking within networking we can view network utilization graphs on a few specific metrics down here and clicking on the manage option displays our current network settings clicking on edit on the right hand side allows us to make network changes such as IP addresses or DNS the time settings display our time zone along with which NTP servers are currently in use by default the vCenter 6.5 appliance defaults to e.t.c UTC for the time zone I'm going to be changing this time zone to match Sydney Australia the update settings display the current version of your vCenter 6.5 appliance clicking on settings allow you to check for automatic updates and also allows you to change the repository settings mostly in this section we can also check updates from the repository or from a cd-rom within the administration section we can change the root password and also set password expiration settings an email can also be sent to warn of password expiration moving on to Susur log configurations we can setup the syslog logging level syslog host port and protocol the CPU and memory section displays the current utilization you also have the ability to display up to the last quarter of utilization graphs lastly the database section displays the current utilization for the vCenter database seat seed stands for stats events alarms and tasks at the lower part of the screen you can also see space utilization trends up to the last quarter now we're going to be exiting from the appliance management page and entering into the vSphere web client to access your vCenter 6.5 vSphere client we simply browse to your vCenter fqdn followed by /v sphere - client i'm going to log in with administrator at vSphere local along with my password first up we're going to configure our Active Directory authentication so that we can login to the SSO admin area and recenter using a user from our Active Directory domain we'll click on home administration and under single sign-on we'll select configuration make sure that you're on the identity sources tab and we'll click on the green plus symbol in identity source types we have four options I'm going to be selecting the active directory as an LDAP server and for the name I'm going to be using Active Directory VM labs the base DN for users is going to be three C equals VM lab comma DC equals local and it's going to be the same for groups the domain name is VM labs local the domain alias will just be the name of my domain which is the M lab and I'll enter in a username and password that has access to the Active Directory I'm going to select the option to connect to a specific domain controller and for the primary server URL I'll be typing in elder colon forward slash forward slash VM 81 dot VM labs local you also have the option to enter in a secondary domain controller and if you like to use secure old up you can select this option at the bottom we're now ready to add our identity source so we'll click finish we can see that the identity source has been added up here I'm going to be selecting this symbol here which is set the default domain and also like yes here the default domain allows me to enter in just my user account when I go to log into the vCenter server as opposed to entering in administrator @vm lab local now with in Active Directory I've created an ad group called V Center six five - admins which contains the ad user administrator I'll be using these groups for my permissions with SS o and V Center to give our Active Directory user admin rights to the single sign-on we'll click on users and groups under single sign-on we'll click on groups will select administrators and we're going to add a user to the administrators group by clicking on this symbol so the domain will be selecting VM lab dot local in the search field we'll enter in our Active Directory group V Center six five - admins and we'll click on the magnifying glass will select the group and click Add followed by ok as you can see our Active Directory group has been added and this allows any user that is a member of the V Center 65 - admins group full administrator access to the single sign-on area now under access control in global we can assign permissions here which will take effect on all these entered service hosts VMs etc however for this lab I'm going to show you how to add admin permissions on a specific vCenter server we'll click on home and hosts and clusters make sure you have the vCenter server selected here on the left and we'll select the permissions tab under the permissions tab we'll click on the green plus symbol and under the users and groups we'll click Add will drop the domain down to VM lab dot local and we'll select our V sign s65 admins group and click Add and followed by ok on the right hand side we have the assigned role for our group if I drop that down we have a few options here that we can select for our demo we're going to be selecting administrator and we'll click OK we can see that our groups been added now to the permission and I'm going to log out of Val vSphere client and log in with our Active Directory domain user if we go back to the single sign-on area and configuration we can see that we have access to all areas of the single sign-on if we didn't have access there we would get a permission denied warning that will be displayed over here will now head back over to our vCenter server and we're going to begin to create some folders data centers and clusters followed by adding in our two ESXi 6.5 hosts we're now going to be creating two folders to use as geo locations Sydney will create using the vSphere client and mobile we will create using power CLI so we'll right click on our vCenter server select new folder and type in sydney if you don't already have power CLI you can simply go to this URL to download it and in this URL we have power CLI 6.5 release 1 once you've downloaded it and installed it it will look like this and the first thing that we need to do we need to connect to our vCenter server to connect to our vCenter server we type in connect - VI server followed by our V Center fqdn it's going to ask us to authenticate so we'll authenticate using my vm lab user and the pal CLI command to create a new folder simply new - folder - name and the name of the folder so in this case we'll call it Melbourne and the location that you wish to create the folder in and we'll press enter we can see on the left-hand side here that we have Melbourne folder created next we're going to create two data centers one in Sydney and the other one in Melbourne to create a data center we select the folder right click select new data center and type in our dough center name we'll jump back into power CLI and we'll create our Melbourne data center to create the data center in Palace CLI we type in new - data center followed by - location now this is the folder name so we'll type Melbourne followed by - name and the name of the data center and if we expand Melbourne we can see we have our meld dc1 created now I'm going to be adding two ESXi 6.5 hosts those hosts are going to be connected to the Sydney data center so for the first host we'll right-click the data center and select add host I've added a host record in the active directory DNS so I'm going to be using the fqdn for our ESXi host and that is ESXi 6 5 - 1 vm lab dot local will type in the root username and password for ESX i will accept the certificate from ESXi as it's a brand new host it does not contain any virtual machines now we're just going to use the evaluation license for the evaluation license of the center or ESXi you have 60 days to use that before it expires we'll click on next you have three options here to lock down the ESXi host we're just going to leave that as disabled in this lab and if we had any virtual machines located on the ESXi host in step number six we can select where we want those virtual machines to reside so I'm just going to leave that at seed dc1 and here's a quick summary of our settings I will click finish now we're going to be adding our second ESXi host with power seer life to add a host we're simply going to be using two commands the first is we're going to connect to the ESXi 6 5 - 2 host and put the information into a variable the variable that we're going to use is called ESXi host and so the server will just give the IP address we enter in our root username and password for ESXi and if we just have a look at this variable we have our ESXi information here now we're going to reconnect to our vCenter server and we'll be using the same command as we did previously we'll enter in our user credential and now we're ready to add the host into our feed dc1 data center to do that we're going to use the add vm host command followed by - server we're going to use the ESXi variable ESXi host followed by - name and the fqdn of the ESXi 6 live host - location and then we'd in brackets we're going to type get - data center and the name of the data center lastly we're going to be using the - force option and the reason for this is that ESXi uses a self-signed certificate the - fourth option bypasses the certificate validation checks we're going to enter in our ESXi root username and password and our ESXi host has now been added to the CDC one data center now that we have added the two hosts we'll configure their network IP addressing if I back on host number one and I go to physical adapters you can see that we have three network cards vm x 0 is the data network CM nick one is the emotion and vm nick 2 is the storage I'm going to click on VM kernel adapters and I'll click on this symbol here to create a new VM kernel adapter make sure that the first option is selected and click Next I'll create a new V switch this is going to be for our V motion networks we're going to add in the network adapter VM NIC 1 so the network label will type in V motion the tcp/ip stack will select a V motion the IP address is going to be 1 9 2 1 6 8 10 - 1 9 8 7 that mask will be 255 255 255 0 and we'll click Next here's the summary of our network settings and we'll just click on finish we're going to click the symbol again to create a new vmkernel adapter again make sure the internal adapters selected will create a new V switch click the plus symbol we're going to be selecting vo mix - this is sort of elf storage network now so the network label will type in NFS and we'll leave the rest of the settings as default the IP address for our storage network is 192 168 2.1 9 8 and the subnet mask is 255 255 255 0 again here is a summary of your network settings and we'll click finish now that we have our network set up we are going to be adding in two data stores 1 data stories for our V swap and the second data store is for our virtual machines if I click on data source and select the symbol to create a new data store I'm going to select NFS I'll leave the NFS 3 selected we're going to name our datastore VCO 65 - of this wok and for the folder location we're going to type in /fo liam 1 /v c 6 5 - v swap and our NFS IP address is 192 168 204 step number 4 displays a summary of your NFS things and we'll click finish to complete this section now we're going to click on the same symbol again to create another data store will select NFS NFS version 3 the name of the data store will be vSphere 65 - data store 1 the folder will be /uh volume 1 /v c or 65,000 data store 1 and the NFS server IP is 1 9 2011 --is-- next I'm going to rename the local data store from data store 1 to es xi6 5 - 1 underscore local and the reason for this is that so I can see which data store belongs to which host when I'm browsing through the storage settings I'm going to repeat the data store setup on host number 2 but I'm just going to pause the video momentarily and then I'll be back shortly I'm going to be setting up the NTP servers on this ESXi host so if we scroll down and select plan configuration and we'll click Edit we'll select user Network Time Protocol click on start will change the startup policy and select start and stop with host and I'm going to paste in our NTP server list once the list has been added we can click on ok ok next we're going to be creating the cluster so to create the cluster I'm going to right click on my datacenter select new cluster and we'll give our cluster a name and we're going to turn on DRS and also turn on H a we're going to leave these settings on as default and we'll click OK now I'm going to drag our ESXi 6 5 - 1 host into the cluster and if the ESXi host did contain any virtual machines is just going to simply place it in the root resource pool otherwise you have the option to create a new resource pool and add the virtual machines in there I will click OK the ESXi host has now been added into the VM lab cluster we are going to keep the cluster settings as default there will be a future video explaining the cluster settings in detail one setting that we are going to change is the virtual machine swap location and before we set the host V swap datastore I'm going to just go through our host number two and set up all the networking that we did similar to the host number one and I'm going to add that into the cluster so I'll just pause the video and then I'll return once that's been done ok host number two has now been added in you can see here we've got all of our network settings and Mike host number one we have all our data stores mounted ok next we're going to be selecting the swap file location so under the host configure tab and swap file location we're going to click on edit and you can see from the cluster settings that it's set to use a specific data store so we're going to be selecting our V swap data store and we'll okay we can see that our B speed 65 D swap data stores been selected and we're also going to do this for host number two next we're going to be creating a resource pool so we'll right-click on the cluster quick new resource pool for the resource pool we're going to be calling a development and we'll click OK and now that brings us to the last step in this tutorial and that is to create a virtual machine to create a virtual machine I'm going to right click on my development resource pool select new virtual machine and new virtual machine once again we have multiple options when we go through the wizard to create a new virtual machine for this demonstration we're going to be selecting the first option will give our virtual machine a name web server 0 1 and we're going to be placing our web server in Sydney and Finnell in the data center called CID DC 1 we're going to select our development resource pool for the compute results and click Next for storage we're going to be placing it in VCS 6 5 - data store 1 we will leave the compatibility as ESXi 6 point 5 and later however you do have multiple options here if you wish to change the compatibility level our guest OS is going to be Windows and the OS version will be Windows Server 2012 64-bit I'll give my virtual machine two CPUs and we'll stay with the default of 4 gigabytes of RAM so the hard drive I'm going to change this 260 gig and if we expand our new hard disk and take a look at the VM storage policy we can see a new option here - vSphere 6.5 and that is VM encryption policy so in VCS 6.5 you now have the capability to encrypt your virtual machines another handy configuration option which I believe was introduced in vSphere 6.0 is the limit aisle option in this option we can limit the amount of oils to this specific hard disk by simply typing in the IELTS number here the rest of the virtual hardware I'm going to be leaving as default and I'm just going to make one more change and that's over in vm options in vm options if we expand boot options we can select the source file setup what this does is when the virtual machine first start up it will simply enter into the BIOS where we can change the boot order itself so I'm going to tick this option and we'll click Next and finish our creation for our virtual machine now I'm going to power on web server 0 1 and I'm going to be opening up the console for this virtual machine by clicking on the little cog here I'm going to select launch remote console if you haven't installed the remote console before you can simply click on install remote console and get that software installed after that you can simply click Launch remote console and the reason why I'm selecting launch remote console is so that I can mount an ISO file from my windows management server a warning pops up for the security certificate I'll select always shuts this host with this certificate and click connect anyway once I've connected I'm going to be mounting my ISO image by selecting removable devices cd/dvd drive 1 and connect to disk image file I'm going to select my server 2012 r2 ISO image and we can see that the ISO imager has been mounted from here I'm going to click inside the console window and move on over to boot and we'll move to the wrong Drive to the beginning and followed by hard drivers number 2 move over to exit and select exit saving changes and our virtual machine has begun the installation of Windows Server 2012 r2 I'm going to pause the video here and I'll return once I've completed the installation of the server our virtual machine has now completed its installation we're going to log in by pressing the control alt delete button and I'll just enter my password if we head back over to the VCO web client we can see that the VMware tools is now installed so that's going to be the next step we're going to be installing VMware tools and we can simply do that by clicking on the VM RCD menu selecting manage and then install VMware tools will then head over to Windows Explorer I'll select the DVD drive where VMware tools is mounted the VMware tools wizard appears and we'll click Next we'll just be running through a typical installation so I'm going to click Next and install the installation is now complete we'll click finish and we'll reboot if we log in to our virtual machine again if we click on the bottom right hand corner we can see a vmware tools' has been successfully installed and is running if i minimize the our DMRC window we can see in the vSphere web client that we no longer get the warning message about installing vm tools on this virtual machine and we can now see that vmware tools is running along with its version number displayed right here now that completes this tutorial on vCenter 6.5 i've tried to cover as much as i could in a short amount of time in order to get you up and running i hope that you've enjoyed it and we'll see you next time

Channel: sysadmintutorials

Views: 323,085

Rating: 4.8944917 out of 5

Keywords: vmware, vsphere 6.5, vcenter 6.5, vcsa 6.5, virtualization

Id: gdwZb17H0t8

Length: 33min 20sec (2000 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 21 2017