Page 20 - COMPASS, Q1 2017

feature > vsphere 6.5
Figure 2. Backing up the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA).
Flash-based client; for the time being, how- ever, you’ll need to use the Flash client for day- to-day management of your vCenter Server.
For the past couple of years, VMware has been improving the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA), and this release makes it feature- comparable to the Windows-based vCenter; however, in most cases, it’s the vCenter you should use. (VMware has a program available to migrate a Windows-based vCenter to a VCSA. Smaller migrations seem to work well using the program, but some of the larger and more complicated vCenter Server installations have reported issues using it.)
High Availability (HA) orchestration and ad- mission control in vSphere 6.5 has been re- vamped and has been getting good reviews, with the caveat that it does behave differently than the old HA. Because of this, you should do a fair amount of research and testing on it before implementing it in your datacenter.
VMware has also included some useful and free new features with vSphere 6.5, includ- ing a VCSA backup utility, a 25 Operating System Image (OSI) license for vRealize Log Insight (vRLI) and VCSA native HA.
The built-in VCSA backup utility (see Figure 2) backs up a VCSA’s critical data to an NFS share. During a restoration, a new VCSA is created and the backed up data is injected into it. For smaller deployments, this feature works great, but for large or complicated VCSA deployments, consider different tools to back up the vCenter Server.
I’ve been using vRLI for the last six months, and have found it indispensable for collect- ing, aggregating and analyzing my logs. vSphere 6.5 comes with a vRLI license. vRLI deploys via a vApp, and this version of vRLI does have some limitations, but it uses min- imal resources and is easy to install and use. I highly recommend trying it.
VCSA native HA (VCHA) allows vCenter to run in cluster configuration to protect vCenter against failure. VCHA is simple to set up and is indispensable in a vCenter- centric datacenter (see Figure 3).
Figure 3. Configuring vCenter Native High Availability.
Figure 4. It’s critical to make sure everything works together by checking with the VMware Product Interoperability Matrixes.
18 vmug > compass Q1 2017