Appliance

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).

In the next article describing vSphere 6.5, I will show you how to upgrade vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 to a newer version.

In Today post I will focus on installation of vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 with External Platform Services Controller. As I am working with more complex customer environments there was a need to make my lab a bit more advanced as it was in the past.

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.

In my earlier post How to reset root password in vRealize Orchestrator I showed you how to reset root password in VMware Appliance - vRealize Orchestrator. Fortunately and unfortunately for us we see more and more products shipped as Appliances. I will show you how to secure your Appliances with few simple steps.

Working as a Consultant has extremely advantages - you meet different customers, you face challenges you wouldn’t be able to find in your own environment or in you home lab. Yesterday I was asked by my colleague to take a closer look on two vRealize Orchestrator appliances - we were not able to login via ssh as root user any more. I will show you how to reset root password in vRealize Orchestrator in just a few steps.

Software life-cycle is incredibly important in every company and environment. As you probably know Microsoft finished support of Windows Server 2003 14 of July. After that you need extended support which costs a lot of money per server. If you want to avoid situations where your software is no longer support you have to invest time and money into upgrades.

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.