What is VMware vSphere ESXi and vCenter?

[Music] hey what's going on everybody this is probably Lestat info here and in this video I want to talk about what is VMware vSphere ESXi and vCenter and what's the differences between the two products and what you should use each one and more specifically I'm going to be talking about vSphere ESXi 6 point 5 and V Center 6 point 5 so jumping right into things what is VMware vSphere ESXi so we'll download the ESXi image directly from vmware and it's going to be an ISO image and once all that on top of bare-metal hardware just like we would any other operating system and it's going to act like a type 1 hypervisor so unlike running VMware Workstation where you would normally boot into Windows or your Linux operating system and then open up VMware Workstation run VMs this is going to be an operating system surely for running virtual machines it's not going to do anything else and that's why it's called a type 1 hypervisor so it's this thing is going to boot up and it's going to be able to run virtual machines and that is it so the minimum hardware requirements you're going to want to make sure you have a CPU that has at least two cores obviously the more the better a minimum of 4 gigabytes of RAM and you want to make sure that the CPU also has support for intel vt-x or AMD rvi and that will enable support support for 64-bit operating systems which is going to be pretty much everything that you're going to see nowadays another handy feature that I didn't actually mention in the slides but is a feature of the CPU that's good to have is EPT or extended page table support and that comes in handy if you're trying to attach a GPU to a virtual machine or if you're trying to do some sort of nested virtualization which is a good way to test hyper-v but EPT support is not mandatory for getting yourself up and running with a basic ESXi install and getting virtual machines going also it definitely helps out to have multiple physical NICs installed in the host machine it's not mandatory you could totally get by with either a single you know like Gigabit link or anything that but it definitely helps to have multiples because you're going to have virtual machine traffic management network traffic B motion traffic all that kind of stuff once you really get up and running so I would say the minimum two gigabit links but you could definitely get by with just one in like a lab environment moving on ESXi by itself allows for the basic creation and management of virtual machines and the virtual networking that goes along with the single host the vSphere management interface is going to be web-based and you access that through a web browser by browsing to the IP address of the ESXi host itself and then from there you'll be prompted for a login screen and you can log in and manage the host directly from what I can tell my testing you can still connect to ESXi host directly with the old vSphere client c-sharp or the fat client as it's called but you cannot log into vCenter 65 with that client but you can directly connect a host still and for my final bullet point there is a free version I'll put the links to all that down below and on my blog as well but if you sign up for a free VMware account they will give you a license that's pretty relaxed as far as just running ESXi by itself and that's definitely worth checking out if you're worried about paying for it or anything like that there's totally a free version and it's actually pretty useful and the license is pretty relaxed now let's talk about a typical ESXi server layout on the left-hand side you're going to see an ESXi host and that's going to represent some sort of physical hardware now that could be a dell poweredge server and HP a blade server this could be a white box that you have laying around that you just want to try and eat run ESXi on I mean as long as it boots it you should be good to go that's what I did with my first ESXi machine I had an old gaming box that the motherboard I'd bought new motherboard and I managed to do it eeehh 6i4 won on it and get some virtual machines up and running so whatever you got but some sort of physical hardware now in this case we're going to say that has two CPUs and each one of those CPUs has six cores available along with 72 gigabytes of RAM and 500 gigs of local storage now for storage you're going to want to make sure that you have plenty of disk i/o available if you're expecting good performance so you're going to want to look into things like SSDs of great configurations raid 5 raid 10 things like that or you can just run a single virtual machine per single disk if you're not worried about redundancy but you want to make sure you have plenty of disk i/o available if you're expecting good performance so this is kind of a perfect use case for ESXi on the left-hand side we have a physical machine it's kind of too powerful to run any single machine with a real purpose and not waste cycles not waste CTU cycles in memory for how we're intending to use it so what we do is we take that piece of hardware install ESXi on top of it and then we can divide it up into multiple virtual machines that use portions of those resources so if you notice on the right hand side we have three virtual machines running on top of this physical piece of hardware so the three virtual machines that I have provisioned here you'll notice that there's a Windows machine with four V CPUs 12 gigabytes of RAM multiple disks for the storage the next up there's a Linux machine with 3 V CPUs 8 gigs of ram and 60 gigs of storage and then lastly there's a pfsense machine with 2 V CPUs 4 gigabytes RAM and 20 gigabytes of storage and that's going to act as our firewall and ID gas detection system and all of these virtual machines are connected together through the Reese which or the virtual networking on the host so even the way we have one physical piece of hardware I now have three additional machines in my network in addition to the ESXi host itself each one of these machines is going to receive its own IP address but the Windows machine off the login and management managed it through like RDP the next machine will have to SSH into it pfsense machine they'll manage it through the web UI but each machine is going to be a completely own entity with its own resources allocated to it and if you notice in this case I gave the Windows machine for I gave the Linux machine 3 and then the pfSense machine to V CPUs so altogether I've only actually allocated 9b CPUs and if you notice that my physical machine actually has 12 cores available so altogether I still actually have 3 cores available I have additional resources and obviously on the rim too I didn't come anywhere near 72 people like to ram so I have additional resources that I can now allocate to future virtual machines if I want to run them as well which is a huge benefit of doing this and running virtual machines on top of your physical hardware rather than allocating the whole machine to a single operating system also if I begin to realize that I've over sized their undersides any one of my existing virtual machines I can also just dynamically change that at any time and resize that virtual machine giving it more or less resources ESXi by itself doesn't actually have a GUI so if you were to sit and watch a physical host boot this is all you would see notice at the bottom that if we hit f2 we can set some customization like networking options and stuff like that otherwise the only other option is to shutdown or reboot the host and that's it the majority of the time you'll actually be managing the ESXi host itself through the web management console and no access that by on the remote host typing in the IP address of the ASX I'd host itself into your web browser and you'll see that they'll pull up the web management console where you'll log in with the username and password that was created during the installation of ESXi and then once logged in we can do everything from create new virtual machines manage the networking add new adapters change the failover order at Nuvi switches all that kind of stuff as well as configure age configure the host itself and I'm say any virtual machines go offline you're not able to SSH into it RDP into it this will also provide console access to those virtual machines and all of that kind of stuff but this is the main way that in ESXi host is accessed in managed and that's it so but the only thing about this is you can only manage a single host at a time since we're connecting directly to the IP address and that's it and that's where vCenter comes in if you want to manage more than one host of time that's where you really need to start looking at vCenter but for now we have a single host we can run multiple virtual machines we're not going to be able to move virtual machines between hosts if we do have multiple et6 I notice on our network that's another thing that that's where vCenter comes in but for now you can run a bunch of single hosts if you want and the management will be a little tricky you could do some things like s ap hosts our virtual machines from one host to the other but they'll be happy they'll have to be offline and whatnot but you can do it but it gets a little bit janky you can also script some of those things as well but for the most part this is a great solution to run a few virtual machines on a few single hosts and you're not really worried about backups you're not really worried about redundancy or high availability and this is a totally free solution at this point so that brings me to my next point with what is VMware vCenter now vCenter is typically deployed as a virtual machine on top of an ESX Aiko's so you're either going to deploy VMware server appliance or the VCS a which in previous builds was actually based on top of Susie Linux but as a 6-5 it's actually based on top of VMware's both on OS but the server appliance is basically a pre rolled pre-configured solution and there's different sizes available for the deployments but it's a pre rolled solution that is built for AJ and is very easy to configure the other way to go would be to deploy it on top of a Windows virtual machine and I also need to tie to an MS equal database and you also need to set up some DSM's and connection strings and stuff like that for that so there's a little bit more management overhead with the Windows deployment but that is still out there but the server appliance is definitely the preferred and easier way to go nowadays so once you have the center provision to your environment it will provide a central management interface to manage all of your ESXi host and virtual machines as those the networking and all that stuff associated with those hoes and it actually includes two management interfaces there's the traditional flash interface which which most people will complain about because it tends to be a little bit slow but it is still the most full-featured console that is available to manage vCenter Andreus X I host but there is an additional html5 base console and it's a lot quicker to load in a lot quicker on basically every single tasks and it's a lot cleaner and the interface itself but it's a lot of full-featured but it does have all of the features that you'll need to complete the majority of your day-to-day tasks lastly probably the most important bullet point for and reason for having be centered environment is vCenter allows for advanced features like virtual machine cloning B motion and SVG motion high availability fault tolerance TRS or distributed resource scheduling which is basically load balancing your VMs across multiple hosts and much much more so basically V Center enables you to have a lot of features that allow you to move virtual machines back and forth between hose sometimes the majority of time while they're on with no downtime sometimes you may have to power that virtual machine off and move it but still there's a lot of a lot of fluid movement between hosts whenever you have V Center so when you take into account the advanced advanced features that V Center provides and you combine them with the functionality of power CLI you can really create a lot of automation in your environment and that you can do that you can script out tasks that your administrators would normally be doing every day or consistently on a regular scheduled basis it's just fully automated as a scheduled task and and not only does it make life easier on them but it also promotes consistency in the environment and it also in the end most likely increase your overall uptime and provisioning and reduce your provisioning times as well and you can do this with the PowerShell that your administrators already knew so there's no learning curve all I have to do is pick up a few additional commandlets and they can hit the ground running all right so this is just a basic diagram of what a typical V Center environment is going to look like so on the left hand side you'll see the V Center appliance and that's actually going to be running on top of one of these ESXi hosts as a virtual machine but once that the V Center appliance is up and running we can then go ahead and add the ESXi host into the inventory for the V Center clients and then once those hosts are added into the inventory it'll automatically pick up any virtual machines associated with those hosts and then we can manage the host and the virtual machines on them so we can manage the configuration of the host we can create new virtual these power machines on and all that kind of stuff edit their settings and all that but in addition to just that basic functionality that we had with the other just the es ESXi console they can also do advanced things for example we can now be vmotion virtual machines from one host to the other we can also clone virtual machines so if we have a golden image or something like that we can go ahead and clone that to another virtual machine you can also turn it into a template for fast provisioning as well a template that you want to use all the time like your standard Windows 2012 image or something like that and then we also have other features like the DRS like say we put the hosts into a cluster and we have some shared storage we could then enable advanced functionality like DRS or distributed resource scheduling where if any oast in the cluster is too busy it'll automatically move virtual machines to a host that is less busy and there's also high availability and fault tolerance where if anything happens to a particular host it'll automatically start those virtual machines up on another host that isn't having issues at that time to make sure that our virtual machines keep running having V Center in the environment also enables some of the more advanced networking features like distributed V switches which is like a regular V switch except it's a switch that's distributed across multiple hosts which makes it very easy to configure because it's all done from the Central v center console rather than configuring it on each host individually alright so now I'm just going to give you a quick view of what it looks like when the server appliance is fully booted up and at the console so I'm actually on an ESXi host here the one hosting the server appliance and I'm just going to right click and pull up the console and I'll show you what it looks like real quick but you'll see that it's a very basic console it looks very similar to the ESXi host but this one could be blue and grey rather than the yellow a grey and we see that it provides some basic information about the host in the all the URLs that we need to manage and access v Center as well as manage the server appliance itself and but that's it that's all you really do here you'll see there's the F 2 and F 12 at the bottom to shutdown and restart it and customize it but than that there's really no much you do there's not really a GUI on the server appliance and so if we browse through the IP address of the visa and our appliance itself you'll see that it has links to both the flash-based console in the new html5 one as well so let's take a quick look at the flash-based console first so if you've used the flash-based console before in the past it should bill it should feel pretty similar version 625 hasn't changed that much things have been rearranged a little bit there's been some more speed tweaks and whatnot to the UI it's definitely a lot faster more responsive than it was in the past but it still sees a lot of the same problems that are typically associated with a flash-based UI but this is the console where you will go to manage your entire vCenter instance this is where you'll manage and add all of your hosts the virtual machines that are on them things like the DRS config fault tolerance all those advanced features your networking distributed Reese witches all of that will be managed through this console here instead I'm just going to quickly pull up the html5 client what you see is accessed by accessing or typing in the IP address of the vCenter appliance itself slash UI and should take you to the html5 client but you'll see that the UI looks kind of similar to the flash base when we have a lot of the same options but overall the UI is a little bit cleaner and it's a lot more responsive overall as well and you can still do the majority of your day-to-day tasks in the html5 client you can power machines on get console access edit their settings migrate them cloned machines all that kind of stuff you just won't find some of the more advanced features ported over yet but supposedly they are going to be eventually alright so let's just quickly recap everything we talked about today so we covered VMware vSphere ESXi and the ESXi image is downloaded and installed on so bare metal Hardware just like any other operating system and it's going to act as a type 1 hypervisor and this is going to allow for the basic creation and management of virtual machines in the virtual networking that goes along with it the vSphere management console or interface is going to provide access and management for a single host at a time so you're going to access this by browsing to the IP address of the ESXi host itself in your web browser and that will allow you to manage any virtual machines and networking on that host and there is a free license available from VMware you can get it from their site route as you sign up for a free account on VMware comm and they'll hook you up with the free license and it's pretty relaxed and it really works out great if you're just looking to run a few hosts and in a few virtual machines on top of those hose which is a pretty typical if you're one running like your own home lab or something like that this is a great use case for this license I highly recommend you check it out and I'll put links to all that stuff down below and on my blog as well and next up we have VMware vCenter so when you get to the point where you have you know more than just a few individual hosts and virtual machines running on top of them and kind of becoming a lot to manage it's really when you want to bring vCenter into your environment and pair it with your ESXi hosts so vCenter itself is typically going to be typically going to be deployed as either the VMware vCenter server appliance or the VCS a or there is an install package available for Windows that can be paired with my CRM a sequel and all of that stuff but it is going to provide a central management interface and you can manage all of your ESXi hosts from that central console as well as the networking data stores all of the associated stuff because one with your hosts in the virtual machines D Center actually comes with two management consoles the traditional flash based console as well as the new html5 based console and lastly one of the biggest selling points about having be center in your environment is all of the advanced features that it brings with it like VM cloning of V motion and storage V motion high availability fault tolerance DRS and much much more it really is an enterprise-grade solution and a set of features that you can really trust to run your environments on top of especially when the uptime and availability is of high concern and I think that's what I'm going to wrap this one I hope that it gives you a little more of an idea of what VMware ESXi is and and the idea of how virtual machines run on top of it as well as when to bring B Center into your environment and what exactly it is used for in and what features it brings along with it I know a lot of guys when they're first starting to get into the VMware products and what not they tend to get easily confused and it kind of just all turns to one gym big jump with math so that was kind of my intent with this video was to kind of break it up make it easy to digest and know that you know this is what ESXi is used for and this is when you need to bring the center in in the features that it provides and the upcoming weeks will actually be covering how to install VMware ESXi onto a host machine as well as how to deploy a VMware vCenter server appliance in your environment and both of those would be version 6.5 but I'll be covering both the ESXi hypervisor itself and the vCenter server appliance and then adding some hosts into the inventory and all that kind of stuff so make sure you stay tuned and check those out whenever they're released and as always I thank you for watching

Channel: Rob Willis

Views: 598,653

Keywords: VMware, vSphere, ESXi, vCenter, 6.5, differences, console, web, access, html 5

Id: -Hltydu9PXk

Length: 20min 3sec (1203 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 08 2017