Deep Intro to VMware, Part 3: Virtual Infrastructure Client

In Part 2 I explained some of the functionality of Virtual Center, now better known as VCenter. In this part I explain some of the Virtual Infrastructure client. The virtual infrastructure client actually is the client that accesses the Virtual center. When you have virtual center installed you are able to build a remote connection to the server where you have it installed and then you can manage your virtual machines.

The Virtual Infrastructure client is somewhat the same, but it has a great enhancement.

The VI can connect to the Virtual center and then it gives you and all your co-admins the ability to connect to the virtual center all at once.

When you have the Virtual Infrastructure client installed and you start it you have to give up an IP address or a hostname.

Here you have the ability to give the IP address or host name of the Virtual Center server, but you can also enter the IP address of a VMware ESX server or a ESXi server. Then you can manage only that machine.

Off course some of the functionality is not available. Take for instance Cloning. Cloning is only available in the Virtual center server. When you need this functionality you have to connect to a Virtual center server.

Below you find a picture that needs a little bit of an explanation.

In my demo environment I have three VMware hosts.

• The first one is a Vmware server 2.0 running on Windows 2008 server 64 bit.
• The second one is a Shuttle running on VMware ESXi 4 with 8 GB of memory
• and the third one is a lenovo portable running VMware ESX 4 with 3 GB of memory.

To manage my "datacenters" I have two VSphere clients installed.

The first one is installed on the same windows 2008 machine that contains my VMware server 2.0. This is used to build and develop my Virtual machines.

The second one is on a Portable that I take with me on my trips and use it for my work.

On the VMware ESX server I have a virtual infrastructure client installed.

My portable has a network card that is wired to my 192.168.1.x network and has the ability to manage and connect to everything in that network.

The wireless adapter on my portable is connected to a wireless router. This router used to be a Speedtouch 780 wireless adsl router but it now runs a special version. It can no longer be used as adsl router but it works great as switch.

So on my portable I have connections to both segments and it routes traffic from one segment through to the other.

The picture below shows you the difference between a connection to Virtual Center or straight to the server.

As you can see the left screen has no grouping functionality. All virtual machines are listed but not grouped in resourcepools. The version on the right has this grouping functionality. It will make it much more easy when you have a bad naming convention where the server or computername does not reflect the software it is running.

In my case I have several names that make it easy for me to understand what it is.

• DVSSVR is a server. That is easy.
• DVSCL is a client. That is easy also.
• DVSCTX is a citrix server
• DVSSRS is a SUN Solaris server.
• Vstorm is a minimalistic image that we use for our VirtualStorm implementations.

Only for the Vstorm images I use a version number. All the others just have a name and a number that identifies them to me.

If you have no Virtual Center the naming convention will be very helpful. With ten machines it's not a problem, but with hundreds of machines it will be.

One of the other differences is the right click menu.

Below you see the right click menu of the Virtual infrastructure client connected to a VMware server 2.0.

This is totally different from the same right click but then to a Vmware Virtual Center server.

The Virtual Infrastructure Client adapts to the server it is connected to. When the VI Client is connected to a VirtualCenter Server, the VI Client displays all the options available to the Virtual Infrastructure environment, based on the licensing you have configured and the permissions of the user. When the VI Client is connected to an ESX Server, the VI Client displays only the options appropriate to single host management.

In the next article Deep Intro to VMware, Part 4, I will explain the cloning functionality in Virtual Infrastructure. Also I will show you a different way to clone more than one image.