Deep Intro to Vmware, Part 2: Virtual Center

In the previous article, Deep Intro to VMware, Part 1, I mentioned one of the most compelling solutions of VMware, Vcenter server, better known as VMware Virtual Center.

The VMware Virtual Center can be used to manage one or more ESX servers and VMware server 2.0 servers to get the best out of your virtual environment.

Quote from Vmware website: http://www.vmware.com/technology/virtual-infrastru...

VMware vCenter Server provides a scalable and extensible platform that forms the foundation for virtualization management. VMware vCenter Server, formerly VMware VirtualCenter, centrally manages VMware vSphere environments allowing IT administrators dramatically improved control over the virtual environment compared to other management platforms. VMware vCenter Server:

• Provides centralized control and visibility at every level of virtual infrastructure
• Unlocks the power of vSphere through proactive management
• Is a scalable and extensible management platform with a broad partner ecosystem

As you extend virtualization across the datacenter, you need a management platform that can both scale to fit your organization and plug into your existing architecture. VMware vCenter Server enables efficient management of a large scale enterprise, giving you the ability to manage more than 1,000 hosts and up to 10,000 VMs from a single console.

Additionally, VMware vCenter Server's open plug-in architecture supports a broad range of additional capabilities from VMware and its partners. More than 200 VMware partners directly integrate with vCenter Server, allowing you to easily extend the platform for more advanced management capability in areas such as capacity management, compliance management, business continuity and storage monitoring. The vCenter Server APIs also allow customers to integrate physical and virtual management tools, using their choice of enterprise management tools to connect to vCenter Server.

With Vcenter you have a onetime console to manage your environments. One of the features that Vcenter adds to your environment is the ability to clone images. This will help you build identical copies of every virtual machine. With the usage of Sysprep and SIDgen you are able to customise every clone so that they will not conflict with each other.

In the picture above you see a typical Virtual center. This one runs on a computer named DVSSVR01. I created a datacenter name DinamiQs-Demo and attached to that you see one VMware ESX server with the IP address 192.168.2.5.

On this ESx server several virtual machines are running.

In the middle screen it shows you a map of all virtual machines, the storage bays are named Internal Bay and External Bay and totally on the right you can add host and vm options to analyze these maps.

Datacenter:

A datacenter is the primary container of inventory objects such as hosts and virtual machines. From the datacenter you can add and organize inventory object. Typically you add hosts, folders and clusters to a datacenter.

Vcenter server can contain multiple datacenters. Large companies might use multiple datacenters to represent organizational units in their enterprise.

In the picture above you see a host connected to my datacenter. It shows the manufacturer of the host. In my case it is a Lenovo portable. Yes, I use this datacenter for demonstrations and a portable is somewhat easier for traveling than a real server.

This host has one processor with two cores running at almost 2 GHZ, and there is 3 GB memory installed.

The server is not licensed yet. I have a 60 day trial license running that VMware supplies for evaluation. At this time I do not yet have the correct Vsphere licenses. But I will get them in a few days.

This server has one internal disk named Internal Bay in size 110 GB and one external disk that sits in the location of the cdrom player in size 74.5 GB.

I have several Virtual machines running on this server including my Virtual Center server.

To make sure the Virtual Center server always starts when I boot the ESX server I have changed the properties of the virtual machine to alway's start when host restarts.

For some strange reason that is one of the only settings that can not be set in Virtual Center. In one of the next articles in this series I will explain and talk about Virtual Infrastructure client and when you connect straight to the ESX server that client enables you to autostart the guest system.

This was a short introduction into Virtual Center. Please do not hesitate when you have question regarding this software to take a look at the VMware website and search through the communities.