How to Deploy the VMware vCenter Server Appliance ?

The best  alternative to install vCenter Server rather than on a Windows machine, you can download the VMware vCenter Server Appliance. The vCenter Server Appliance is a preconfigured Linux-based virtual machine optimized for running vCenter Server and associated services.

The vCenter Server Appliance has the default user name root and password vmware.

Microsoft SQL Server and IBM DB2 are not supported for the vCenter Server Appliance.

Important

The embedded database is not configured to manage an inventory that contains more than 5 hosts and 50 virtual machines. If you use the embedded database with the vCenter Server Appliance, exceeding these limits can cause numerous problems, including causing vCenter Server to stop responding.

Prerequisites

■	Verify that vSphere Client is installed.
■	You can deploy the vCenter Server Appliance only on hosts that are running ESX version 4.x or ESXi version 4.x or later.
■	The vCenter Server Appliance requires at least 7GB of disk space, and is limited to a maximum size of 80GB. The vCenter Server Appliance can be deployed with thin-provisioned virtual disks that can grow to the maximum size of 80GB. If the host machine does not have enough free disk space to accommodate the growth of the vCenter Server Appliance virtual disks, vCenter Server might cease operation, and you will not be able to manage your vSphere environment. Steps to install vCenter Server appliance  1 From the vSphere 5 download page on the VMware Web site, download the .VMDK and .OVF files for the vCenter Server appliance onto your system. Save the .VMDK and .OVF files in the same folder. 2 Login into your Host using vSphere Client 3 In the vSphere Client, select File > Deploy OVF Template and enter the path to the .OVF file on your system. Deploy Select the path of OVF to get deployed Path of OVF template Details of OVF template Follow the prompts in the Deploy OVF Template wizard to create the vCenter Server Appliance. If you do not want to commit to using the maximum 80GB of disk space at deployment, deploy the OVF with thin provisioning. In the Disk Format panel of the wizard, select Thin provisioned format. Deploy vCenter server Appliance ready to complete Deployment Appliance deployed successfully when started you will get to this window

What is vCloud and vSphere ?

vCloud

vCloud is a cloud computing Platform made by VMware(EMC) which allows customers to migrate their working server on demand from their "internal cloud" of cooperating VMware hypervisors to a remote cloud of VMware hypervisors. The goal of the initiative is to provide the power of cloud computing with the flexibility allowed by virtualization.
The initiative was announced at the 2008 VMworld conference in Las Vegas and garnered significant press attention.
At the 2009 VMworld conference in San Francisco vCloud was featured in the vCloud Pavilion. vCloud was also a subject at the 2010 conference. The vCloud initiative has grown with many public service providers and multiple supporting applications.
vCloud architecture relies on vShield edge for its operation, routed networks in vCloud needs a VM running vShield-edge software, acting as the default gateway of that network. This virtual gateway is implemented on a free host on the system and provides its services to VMs on that host and on other hosts.

vSphere

VMware vSphere is a platform for virtualization to transform datacenters into simplified cloud computing infrastructures and enables IT organizations to deliver flexible and reliable IT services. VMware vSphere virtualizes and aggregates the underlying physical hardware resources across multiple systems and provides pools of virtual resources to the datacenter.

As a cloud operating system, VMware vSphere manages large collections of infrastructure (such as CPUs, storage, and networking) as a seamless and dynamic operating environment, and also manages the complexity of a datacenter. The following component layers make up VMware vSphere:

Key Technology Products of Microsoft and Vmware.

Product Difference

What is a Virtual Appliance ?

By Matthew Leib, for VMwareSimplified.com 

Following is a post as a guest contributor to VMwareSimplified, where our goals will be to instruct on the basics of VMware.

Virtualization as a concept has enabled the IT community a number of fantastic options. Among those amazing options are the ability to deliver a limited level of downtime to the user community by the use of VMotion, brand new dynamics of backup, virtual desktops and virtualization began the first steps to “The Cloud.” I’m sure that even if you’re unaware of all the feature sets, and capacities of VMware, Citrix Xen, OpenStack, and other virtualization platforms, these abilities are apparent. Our community has embraced these, expanded on them, and the ecosystem of vendors offering solutions based on them is massive, growing and the attendance of last year’s VMworld surpassing 20,000 attendees in San Francisco only serve to validate the importance of these technologies.

Another quite powerful tool that has been added to the arsenal of assets for virtualization professionals is that of a Virtual Appliance. This posting will discuss the utility of Virtual Appliances, and some of the viability of these unique pieces of software, how they get implemented and some aspects of how they may be used within the virtual environment.

What is a Virtual Appliance? Essentially, a Virtual Appliance is a disc file that’s been purpose built to perform a specific task. Usually, these will involve the operating system, and the requisite components or applications to perform as a packaged entity. You will be able to download this as one file either packaged up as a ZIP, RAR, TAR, or the virtual appliance format OVA or OVF.

The purposes range from Linux distributions, test functionalities, free/demo/paid deployments of Virtual Storage Appliances, security servers and firewalls, web servers with many different functions, like your very own WordPress server, etc.

Once you download the file, import into your VMware environment. These should easily be functional in ESX(vSphere), Fusion or in Workstation. In many cases, they work as-is in Player as well.

In future posts, I’ll delve into some of the functions of distinct Virtual Appliances, and assist on the creation, deployment, and installation of these. 

Unable to power on VM..?

Unable to power on the Virtual Machine, How to fix it?

If the virtual machine is running in a cluster of esx hosts, some times it won’t power on. Why because, the files that are associated with that VM are locked by the host at the time of running. So when you try to vmotion the vm from one host to another host, the first host releases those files and again locked by the second host.
So what is meant by locking here, and why it is happening?
Locking is nothing but, the registration of a vm with a host. this happens everytime when the vm is hosted on a host. this is helpful to prevent the access to the same vm for remaining hosts in the cluster.
Why the vm fails when trying to power it on?
When the files associated with that VM are locked by a host it won’t powered on. At that time, you must unregister the vm from the host using vmware-cmd utility.