vCenter Server

Todays post will focus on upgrade from vCenter Server 7.x to 8.x. Process itself isn’t very complicated and in normal environment should take around 1h. Let’s dive into it!

vCenter Server (be it the appliance or not) is the critical management component of every vSphere environment. Therefore it is critical to backup it at regular basis to have the possibility to restore configuration prior to failure. With the vSphere 6.5 release, vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) received the possibility to perform the backup of its configuration from appliance management interface (not only but I will describe this later on).

vSphere 6.5 is on the market for quite a bit of time. In most cases, customers don’t perform upgrade immediately after the release of new software. It was the same with my home lab. I wanted to take a holistic approach and perform an upgrade to the latest and greatest release of all products I have in my home lab. In this first post, I will show you upgrade process of all components I use.

Even if you are running lab environment vSphere upgrades still have to be done. Same in my case. I wanted to upgraded my environment from vCenter Server 6.0.0 build 2559268 to vCenter Server 6.0 U1b build 3343019.

Many of the IT environments have so called security driven approach. Every time I hear that something has to be implemented it is because security said so. Don’t get me wrong - by all means I like to be secure and compliant. In my opinion there should be balance between Security and Costs.

In third and last post VMware vCenter Server 6 on Windows Server 2012 R2 with Microsoft SQL Server 2014 - Part3 I will cover vCenter Server installation.

In second post VMware vCenter Server 6 on Windows Server 2012 R2 with Microsoft SQL Server 2014 - Part 2 I will describe how to configure Microsoft SQL Server to be used for vCenter Server and we will create vCenter database.

With new VMware vSphere version 6 much more people choose vCenter Server Appliance instead of vCenter on Windows because now it has same limits. However there are still organisations which prefer to use vCenter Server on Windows Server. In first post - VMware vCenter Server 6 on Windows Server 2012 R2 with Microsoft SQL Server 2014 - Part 1 I will describe Microsoft SQL Server 2014 preparation and installation. In next post I will continue with database creation and vCenter Server installation.

In my earlier post vCenter Server Appliance 6 (vCSA) installation I guided you through vCenter Server Appliance 6 installation. Next step is to configure our Appliance so we can use it in our environments.

It has been a while when I wrote some technical post, but for me this is kind of habit after I pass huge exam. With this post and following ones I will focus on version 6 of vSphere and some topics around SDDC.