VSphere

vSphere/vCenter

vSphere is VMWare's virtualization platform and a central planning/management area to work on VMWare products. In vSphere, we use vCenter to connect all of our ESXi hosts together and manage them all from a single place. vSphere also adds other services such as vSphere Replication to the environment which allows us to take daily replications of our VMs. vSphere is located on a virtual machine on 10.21.25.2 called Yggdrasil. It can be accessed at https://10.21.25.5 with the login [email protected] and the highest level pintech password.

Installing vCenter

1. The location of the installer can be found \\10.21.25.13/Cisco Curriculum/vSphere Downloads/VMware-VCSA-all-7.0.3-18778458/vcsa-ui-installer/win32/installer
2. When you first open up the installer you're given four options: install, upgrade, migrate, and restore.
3. From here you just follow the steps to installation. You will need to have a ESXi machine running to be able to install vCenter.

Updating

• To start the update process you want to go and head over to the vCenter management web interface at https://yggdrasil.mhs.24pin.tech:5480/#/login.
• Go to the update section of the page and wait for the available updates to load.
• I would choose the latest update available or if you are looking for a specific update you can mess with the update selection settings.
• When you go to update it will do two things, it will ask you to make a backup, and it will check the database health. For the backups you can select backup now and check the box that says use the scheduled update settings. From there you will just need to put in the ITX password and continue. Now if you run into a issue with the database health you will have to refer to the article found in helpful links.
• When it gives you the option to start the update it might take a while, this is fine since the vCenter should start back up and resume on it's own.
• When updating, downtime is not required for the ESXi hosts that vCenter Server is managing, or for virtual machines that are running on the hosts.

vSphere Replication

vSphere Replication is a appliance offered by VMWare for their vCenter servers. We have it setup so that our vSphere replication appliance and vCenter are both on Asgard. You can choose which VMs you want to replicate and how often they sync/replicate so you can restore to a previous version if something ever goes wrong. Replications can be accessed at 10.21.25.26 using [email protected] and the highest level password. Once you are in, you can view the replications by clicking view details and then the pressing the replication tab.

Replicating:

1. For the target site choose manually select and then select vSphereReplicationAsgard
2. Choose the machine you want to replicate
3. For the target datastore choose the opposite of what the machine is currently on
4. Change the replication time to every 24 hours
5. Press finish to start the initial sync of the machine (you can check the progress of the replication by using the drop down)\

Restoring:

1. Right click the machine you want to restore and then press the recover button
2. When choosing you recovery options you want to use the latest available data if it is a restoration of a broken machine, or in very small cases sync most available data for other reasons.  Also make sure the machine doesn’t turn on at start, this is for later.
3. For the machine you want to choose the opposite of what the current machine is on (example: the web server is on Valhalla so we would choose Asgard) and then press finish.
4. Mark the checkbox next to the VM Network option in the VM settings if it is not connecting to the network.
5. When finished, be sure to always change the name of the broken server and the working one to easily differentiate them.
6. Once you restore a machine you have to make sure you delete the replication and then create it again for the new working machine.

VM Snapshots

VM Snapshots are short term restore options that can be created before you apply major updates or changes to a virtual machine. It allows you to create multiple restore points of your virtual machine as you go through the update process. Snapshots must be deleted to update the storage of any VM.

Creating a snapshot:

• Select the VM you want to create a snapshot of and navigate to the snapshot tab.
• Press take snapshot to create a snapshot (write why the snapshot is being taken in the description)
• Uncheck VM memory when taking snapshots of Yggdrasil or vSphereReplication

Reverting a snapshot:

• Select the VM you want to create a snapshot of and navigate to the snapshot tab.
• Click on the snapshot you want to revert to and then press finish to restore the VM to the snapshot.
• Once you have fixed the issue, make sure to delete that snapshot and then create a new snapshot for the latest version.

Troubleshooting

Changing root password:

• To change the password of the root user, access Asgard and open Yggdrasil in the console.
• From here, enter the root user and password to login.
• Once you have logged in, type shell and then type passwd to create a new password.

Changing root password (no password):

• https://vmware.github.io/photon/assets/files/html/3.0/photon_troubleshoot/resetting-a-lost-root-password.html