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Category: vSphere 6.5

vSphere 6.5 – vSphere HA Orchestrated Restart

vSphere 6.5 – vSphere HA Orchestrated Restart

VMware announced a new feature in vSphere 6.5 called HA Orchestrated Restart. But wait a minute – it was already available in previous version where you were able to set the restart priority for specific VMs or group of VMs. So what’s going on with this “new feature” ? As always, the devil is in the details 🙂 Let’s start from the old behavior. Using VM overrides in previous version of vSphere, we could set one of three available priorities…

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vSphere 6.5 – Secure Boot (ESXi and VMs)

vSphere 6.5 – Secure Boot (ESXi and VMs)

When new feature Secure Boot is enabled, the UEFI firmware validates the digitally signed kernel of an operating system against the digital certificate stored in the UEF firmware. For ESXi 6.5 this capability is further leveraged by the ESXi kernel, adding cryptographic assurance of ESXi components. ESXi is already made up of digitally signed packages, called VIB’s. (vSphere Installation Bundle) These packages are never broken open. At boot time the ESXi file system maps to the content of those packages….

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vSphere 6.5 Installation – Part 4 – vCenter Server Appliance Upgrade

vSphere 6.5 Installation – Part 4 – vCenter Server Appliance Upgrade

In the previous parts I described the process of instalation new components of vSphere 6.5. In this article I’ll show you how the upgrade process looks like. It’s pretty straightforwar providing your DNS is working correctly 😉 During the upgrade process new appliance is deployed with temporary IP address to exchange the original appliance in the final step. This approach gives you the easy way to rollback, because you can turn off the new appliance and power on the original…

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vSphere 6.5 – Encrypted vMotion

vSphere 6.5 – Encrypted vMotion

Another  good news is that You can encrypt the vMotion of any VM, encrypted or not – encrypted VM’s will always use encrypted vMotion : Disabled – do not use encrypted vMotion Opportunistic – use encrypted vMotion if source and destination hosts support it. Required -Allow only encrypted vMotion. Note !!!  Mixed cluster and you have a requirement of encrypted vMotion, then setting to “Required” will not let you vMotion to a host that doesn’t support it. (only vSphee ESXi 6.5…

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vSphere 6.5 – Network-aware DRS

vSphere 6.5 – Network-aware DRS

VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler is a well known VMware feature which is one of the most helpful escpecially in bigger environments. It’s used to balance the load (CPU and Memory) between ESXi hosts in cluster. However, in previous releases it has an imperfection. Let’s imagine a fallowing situation shown below: Assume you have three host in the cluster with 6 VM’s powered on. If you power on  another VM it will be placed on the first host by DRS. Although host…

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vSphere 6.5 – Backup and Restore encrypted VMs

vSphere 6.5 – Backup and Restore encrypted VMs

New encryption gives many possibilities but also make some impact to other tasks in our environment. Let’s consider backup implications – backup and restore of encrypted disks is possible with NBD and HotAdd transport, but SAN mode does not support encrypted virtual machine backup. No API change is involved – ESXi hosts encrypt by attaching an IO Filter. To back up encrypted virtual machines using HotAdd, the backup proxy must have been encrypted as well. The backup process requires “Cryptographer.DirectAccess”…

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What’s New in vSphere 6.5 – ProactiveHA

What’s New in vSphere 6.5 – ProactiveHA

Proactive HA is a new feature Available in vSphere 6.5 released recently. It’s a kind of feature which will even better help you to protect you environment in case of hardware failure. Currently all of the hardware components are redundant including power supplies, fans, network cards etc. However the most possible cause of whole server failure occurs while one of these theoretically redundant components fails. To better imagine that let’s think about power supply fail. There is still the second one…

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vSphere 6.5 Installation – Part 3 – vCenter Server on Windows

vSphere 6.5 Installation – Part 3 – vCenter Server on Windows

This is the third part of the series in which I’m describing the process of installation vSphere 6.5 components. In this part I’ll go throught the process of installation vCenter Server on MS Windows Server 2012 R2. The others parts are: vSphere 6.5 Installation – Part 1 – External PSC vSphere 6.5 Installation – Part 2 – vCenter Server Appliance Now let’s check how the Windows installation looks like in the latest vSphere version. Prerequisities:  ISO for vCenter Server installation….

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vSphere 6.5 Installation – Part 2 – vCenter Server Appliance

vSphere 6.5 Installation – Part 2 – vCenter Server Appliance

In the previous Part I of the series, I described the installation process of external PSC in vSphere 6.5.  In this part I’ll go through the process of vCenter Server appliance deployment. The first step is to download the vCSA ISO image and mount it for instance to your desktop. Inside the ISO image go to D:\vcsa-ui-installer\win32 and run the installer.exe. (This is the same ISO image used for PSC deployment). Then we choose the Install option, as you can see there are also…

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vSphere 6.5 Security Enhancements  

vSphere 6.5 Security Enhancements  

  In this article I will try to point most important security enhancements in recently released vSphere 6.5 platform.  As we can hear from “pre GA” sneak peek information VMware will build security in 3 areas: Secure access – logs monitoring and audit Secure infrastructure – hypervisor with minimal footprint = minimal attack surface and cryptographic option to provide SecureBoot Secure data – hypervisor-level encryption for VM data Let’s go deeper  into the  technology – below is a list of…

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