Sunday funday! I made it to Las Vegas in the afternoon and thankfully it was pretty uneventful. Wow it’s hot out here. 108 degrees in the shade. It’s a good thing the conference is all indoors.
Some nice scenery on the way down.
It is upon us once again. A veritable nerdtopia of cool technology and smart people. It’s a marathon of breakouts, labs, sessions, networking with peers and events. For the uninitiated VMworld is VMware’s annual conference showcasing the latest technologies and products for the now Dell owned company. It is also a hell of a lot of fun if you’re into these sorts of things.
VMworld 2017 is being held in Las Vegas for the 2nd year in a row at the Mandalay Bay Hotel & Casino. Historically VMworld has been held in Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco and Las Vegas. For more general information check out the website and the wiki. I’m of course attending this year and it will be my 3rd VMworld in a row. For fun I’ll quickly run you through the last 2 conferences. Continue reading
This is my first attempt at a series and I decided to make it about vSphere 6.5. I’ll be covering as many new components and features of vSphere 6.5 as possible here so sit back and enjoy!
In the last article we went through deploying the VCSA vCenter Server through the installer. We deployed the VCSA appliance on Stage 1 and then configured some of the basic settings for it on Stage 2. We’re at the last article in the series and so far we’ve configured ESXI using the vSphere Host Client, deployed and configured the VCSA Platform Services Controller and deployed the VCSA vCenter Server. We’re going to finish up by configuring vCenter and adding licensing, creating a datacenter, creating a cluster, adding hosts, applying licensing and finally we’ll enable HA and DRS. Continue reading
This is my first attempt at a series and I decided to make it about vSphere 6.5. I’ll be covering as many new components and features of vSphere 6.5 as possible here so sit back and enjoy!
The next two entries in this series are going to cover deploying and configuring the VCSA vCenter Server. The previous two articles detailed deploying the VCSA Platform Services Controller and getting the necessary permissions set. The VCSA PSC was deployed as external in this case so we will be deploying the VCSA vCenter without an embedded PSC.
Just like with the VCSA PSC there are two parts to the VCSA vCenter Server deployment. Stage 1 covers the Install of the vCenter Server itself. Stage 2 covers the configuration of the vCenter Server after it’s been deployed. Stage 2 sets the NTP settings and applies the vCenter Server settings to the appliance and starts the services. The final steps of the configuration will be in the next article. Continue reading
This is my first attempt at a series and I decided to make it about vSphere 6.5. I’ll be covering as many new components and features of vSphere 6.5 as possible here so sit back and enjoy!
In the last article we went through deploying the VCSA Platform Services Controller through the installer. We deployed the VCSA appliance on Stage 1 and then configured the basic network settings for it on Stage 2. We will continue the process of fully deploying a VCSA PSC appliance here which includes joining it to the Active Directory domain, setting the time zone, checking for updates on the appliance, adding an identity source and setting user/group permissions.
We’ll start where we ended in the deployment. The Installer left us with a Complete status and a couple links to click on. We’re going to go straight to the Appliance Getting Started Page link on the Installer. If you’re starting this outside of the Installer we can just enter the FQDN of the Platform Services Controller using HTTPS into your browser of choice. Continue reading
This is my first attempt at a series and I decided to make it about vSphere 6.5. I’ll be covering as many new components and features of vSphere 6.5 as possible here so sit back and enjoy!
The next few entries in this series are going to cover installing the vCenter Server Appliance. The vCenter Server Appliance or VCSA, for short, is a Linux-based pre-packaged deployment of vCenter. We no longer need a Windows and SQL license to build vCenter. The vPostgres database is embedded within the appliance and neither the OS or database requires any additional licensing. In vSphere 6.5 the VCSA now contains a ton of new features and capabilities like vCenter HA and Update Manager. This means in most cases using the VCSA is going to be a no-brainer.
In vSphere 6 we were introduced to the Platform Services Controller. For those that aren’t aware the Platform Services Controller or PSC is the new component of vCenter that handles global licensing, permissions, authentication (SSO) and certificate management. It can be deployed “embedded” within a vCenter server as an integrated component or it can be deployed as “external” which means it runs on its own server. PSC’s can be deployed on both Windows and Linux-based (VCSA) servers. If you want to use Enhanced Linked Mode, you have to go with an “external” PSC.
For this article, I am going to install an “external” PSC using the VCSA installer. There are two parts to the deployment. Stage 1 covers the Install of the PSC itself. Stage 2 covers the configuration of the PSC, once deployed, through the installer. The actual configuration of the PSC, joining it to the domain and setting administrative user permissions will be in the next article. Continue reading
With this series I hope to put my own spin on the well documented process to build an Active Directory Domain Controller from scratch. I’ll of course be using Microsoft Windows Server 2016 for this. I’m going to include tons of screenshots to document the process step-by-step. The new AD domain is going to be VILAB.local which is clearly for my lab. It will be the cornerstone of my lab in terms of authentication, authorization and centralized LDAP domain management. I’ve broken this series into 3 parts as below:
In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series I covered the hardware requirements, recommended server configuration settings, installed the Roles needed for Active Directory Domain Services and then promoted the server to the first domain controller in our new forest. So we’re done right? No, not exactly. A few things I noticed a lot of articles on this topic didn’t talk about is that we need to validate things are working and there is additional configuration necessary to get us closer to a best practice scenario.
With this series I hope to put my own spin on the well documented process to build an Active Directory Domain Controller from scratch. I’ll of course be using Microsoft Windows Server 2016 for this. I’m going to include tons of screenshots to document the process step-by-step. The new AD domain is going to be VILAB.local which is clearly for my lab. It will be the cornerstone of my lab in terms of authentication, authorization and centralized LDAP domain management. I’ve broken this series into 3 parts as below:
In Part 1 of this series I covered the hardware requirements and some recommended server configuration settings for building a Windows Server 2016 Active Directory Domain Controller. The next step is to actually install the Roles needed for Active Directory Domain Services and then to promote the server to the first domain controller in our new forest.
With this series I hope to put my own spin on the well documented process to build an Active Directory Domain Controller from scratch. I’ll of course be using Microsoft Windows Server 2016 for this. I’m going to include tons of screenshots to document the process step-by-step. The new AD domain is going to be VILAB.local which is clearly for my lab. It will be the cornerstone of my lab in terms of authentication, authorization and centralized LDAP domain management. I’ve broken this series into 3 parts as below:
Right from the start we have a minor issue here. Microsoft doesn’t list any physical or virtual hardware requirements for an Active Directory Domain Controller. Go ahead and Google it, I’ll wait. You’ll be presented with a ton of non-Microsoft websites giving you the minimum OS hardware requirements for either Windows Server 2008 R2, 2012 R2 or 2016. That’s not very helpful of course. I was personally curious and even dug through TechNet’s Windows Server 2016 Documentation Library for Active Directory Domain Services. This time there is a ton of information regarding AD topologies and design methodologies but again no hardware specifications.
This is my first attempt at a series and I decided to make it about vSphere 6.5. I’ll be covering as many new components and features of vSphere 6.5 as possible here so sit back and enjoy!
So by now you may be asking, “How do I configure this thing?” and by “this thing” you mean the VMware Host Client. I’ll be going over that here by configuring networking, storage and building a VM. This is the follow up to the article I recently posted called VMware Host Client – Introduction. That article was, as the name implies, an introduction to the VMware Host Client including what it looks like and what’s new.
This article should demonstrate a few fundamentals for configuring a host using the VMware Host Client. I’m going to configure networking components on the host including vSwitches, VMKernel NICs and Ports Groups, On the storage I will configure the iSCSI Initiator and present a pre-provisioned datastore to the host. Finally I will install Windows Server 2016 on a new virtual machine. Continue reading