VCP4

Other Resources

• VMware VCP Forum
• VCP4 Blueprint
• vSphere Documentation

Plan, Install and Upgrade VMware ESX/ESXi

Install VMware ESX/ESXi on local storage

Minimum Hardware Requirements

• 64bit CPU (AMD Opteron, Intel Xenon [inc Nahalem])
  • CPU Virtualisation features required to support 64bit VM's
• 2GB RAM
• 1+ NIC
• SCSI, Fibre Channel or Internal RAID controller
• LUN, SAS or SATA (SATA must be connected through a SAS controller)

Notes

• ESX's hardware clock should be set to UTC
• IPv6 not supported during installation

ESXi Specifics

• All blank internal disks are formatted with VMFS (except 4GB VFAT scratch/swap partition, used for vm-support dumps)
• Direct Console is used to
  • Configure host defaults
  • Set-up administrator access
  • Troubleshoot
• If no DHCP found during install, default 169.254.0.0 / 16 address assigned

vSphere Editions

Edition	Features
Standard	6 cores/CPU, 4way vSMP, 256GB/ESX, Update Manager, HA
Advanced	12 cores/CPU, Hot Add, FT, vShield, VMotion
Enterprise	6 cores/CPU, Storage vMotion, DRS
Enterprise Plus	12 cores/CPU, 8way vSMP, maxGB/ESX, vNetwork Distributed Switch, Host Profiles, 3rd Party Multipathing

Upgrade VMware ESX/ESXi

Pre-Upgrade Backups

• Backup ESX Host Config
  • Back up the files in the /etc/passwd, /etc/groups, /etc/shadow, and /etc/gshadow directories (shadow dir's may not exist).
  • Backup any custom scripts
  • Backup any .vmx files
  • Backup any local images etc on local VMFS
• Backup ESXi Host Config
  • Use vSphere CLI to run vicfg-cfgbackup --server <ESXi-host-ip> --portnumber <port_number> --protocol <protocol_type> --username username --password <password> -s <backup-filename>
• VM backup
  • Snapshot before upgrade

Install and Configure vCenter Server

Minimum Requirements

• 2x CPU's (2GHz)
• 3GB RAM
• 2GB disk
• Microsoft SQL2005 Express

Scale	VC	CPU	Memory
50 ESXs, 250 VMs	32 bit	2	4 GB
200 ESXs, 2000 VMs	64 bit	4	4 GB
300 ESXs, 3000 VMs	64 bit	4	8 GB

• Database must be 32bit only, regardless of VC's OS (default database on 64bit SQL is 64bit)