appliance

Overview A few weeks ago VMware released vSphere 6.7U1, and in that release comes a tool that has been desired by many customers and partners, which is the vCenter Converge Tool, or in other words, a tool to convert an external vCenter and PSC architecture in to an embedded deployment. In the last few releases of vCenter Server, VMware have supported replication of the PSC functionality between embedded deployment models, including Enhanced Linked Mode (named Embedded Linked Mode for an embedded deployment).

This one will be a quick post, but I wanted to alert people to a new minor but useful feature that’s included in the vCenter 6.7 appliance, which is the ability to schedule backups natively within the appliance management interface. If you wanted to schedule an appliance based backup in 6.5, you would have to schedule a task to do so. Thankfully this was made easier by Brian Graf’s script, but now we have a way to build this in to the appliance configuration with no reliance on an external script.

The post below will walk through the deployment of an embedded vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 using the GUI installer, where the PSC and VC roles are installed on the same servers. This deployment model is perfect for smaller environment where Enhanced Linked Mode is not required. The PSC Topology Decision Tree is a great read if you aren’t sure on how you should deploy these core components given your requirements.

The post below will walk through the deployment of an embedded vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 6.5 node to a target ESXi server using the command line interface (CLI) deployment method. If you are interested in also seeing the GUI deployment or other GUI/CLI deployments, please see my post here which has links off to other individual articles for different deployment methods. For each of the deployment methods I am providing a video as well.

The post below will walk through the deployment of an external vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 6.5 node and Platform Services Controller (PSC) to a target ESXi server using the command line interface (CLI) deployment method. If you are interested in also seeing the GUI deployment or other GUI/CLI deployments, please see my post here which has links off to other individual articles for different deployment methods. For each of the deployment methods I am providing a video as well.

[toc] Introduction So I’ve finally had some spare time to download and have a look at some of the vSphere 6.5 components and I’ll be planning to do a few blog posts in early 2017 on some of the cool new features that have been added in this release. I’ve decided to start with a few posts on the deployment of the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) using both the new GUI installer and the CLI option as well.

For my lab, I run everything nested within VMWare workstation, which is running on a single Dell physical host that runs Windows for the base OS. Over the past couple of months, I’ve been trying to spend a bit more time in the lab, mostly for learning some components of the vSphere environment I’m not familiar with, but also as a test area. I deliberately started the environment with a single embedded deployment, so the PSC and VC server was running on the one node.