What this book covers

Chapter 1, Upgrading to vSphere 5.5, discusses the procedures involved in upgrading an existing vSphere infrastructure to vSphere 5.5. It covers upgrading the vCenter Server, the ESXi host, and the virtual machine tools and virtual machine hardware.

Chapter 2, Performing a New Installation of vSphere 5.5, walks you through the procedures involved in deploying a new vSphere 5.5 infrastructure. It covers the installation of ESXi, vCenter Server, and the deployment of the vCenter Server virtual appliance.

Chapter 3, Using vSphere Host Profiles, covers the use of Host Profiles to create, manage, and use ESXi host configuration templates.

Chapter 4, Using ESXi Image Builder, walks you through the process of creating, managing, and applying image profiles to ESXi hosts.

Chapter 5, Using vSphere Auto Deploy, covers the procedures involved in forming an Auto Deploy infrastructure to enable faster provisioning of stateless or stateful ESXi hosts.

Chapter 6, Configuring vSphere Networking, explains how to set up and configure vSphere networking using vSphere Standard Switches and vSphere Distributed Switches. It covers advanced network configurations such as port mirroring, NetFlow, and the use of PVLANs.

Chapter 7, Creating and Managing VMFS Datastores, walks you through the process of creating and managing VMFS datastores. It also covers the use of datastore clusters and storage DRS.

Chapter 8, Managing iSCSI and NFS Datastores, covers the procedures involved in configuring and managing iSCSI and NSA storage on ESXi hosts.

Chapter 9, vSphere Storage Policies and Storage I/O Control, covers the use of storage policies to ensure that the VMs are placed in datastores categorized into different tiers and how to use storage I/O control to manage the I/O bandwidth between VMs running on them.

Chapter 10, Creating and Managing Virtual Machines, covers the procedures involved in creating and managing virtual machines in a vSphere infrastructure.

Chapter 11, Configuring vSphere HA, covers the configuration of high availability on ESXi clusters.

Chapter 12, Configuring vSphere DRS, DPM, and VMware EVC, covers the configuration of vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler, Distributed Power Management, and VMware Enhanced vMotion Compatibility on an ESXi cluster.

Chapter 13, Upgrading and Patching Using vSphere Update Manager, covers the installation and configuration of vSphere Update Manager and the Update Manager Download Service (UMDS) to manage patching and upgrading of ESXi hosts.

Chapter 14, Using vSphere Management Assistant, covers the deployment and configuration of vMA 5.5 to run commands/scripts remotely on ESXi.

Chapter 15, Monitoring the Performance of a vSphere Environment, covers different methods to monitor the performance of ESXi and virtual machines in a vSphere infrastructure.