WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:07.760 Welcome back to vSphere 8 in the real world. Now we're going to discuss vCenter Server Management Interface. 00:00:07.760 --> 00:00:13.960 So once you've got done deploying your vCenter Server, you're probably going to want to log in and access that vCenter Server. 00:00:13.960 --> 00:00:22.860 So you can log into the vCenter Server just by going to HTTPS and then the IP address or the fully qualified domain name of the vCenter Server. 00:00:22.860 --> 00:00:31.820 So for example, if you did configure a admin at vSphere.local account when you deployed vCenter Server, you could log into its IP address, 00:00:31.820 --> 00:00:39.320 you know, HTTPS colon slash slash IP address, administrator at vSphere.local, and then that password, and you can log into it. 00:00:39.320 --> 00:00:45.660 If you've already set up AD integration, you're logging into this, so it's not your first time to start logging into it, 00:00:45.660 --> 00:00:51.220 you could use your Windows AD domain credentials for logging in here also then. 00:00:51.220 --> 00:01:01.180 Now this is not for accessing the vCenter Server to manage vSphere, meaning to manage your ESXi host and to manage your VMs and to manage DRS and HA. 00:01:01.180 --> 00:01:07.320 This is to log into the vSphere client for managing the virtual appliance itself. 00:01:07.320 --> 00:01:14.180 So this is the vCenter Server Management Interface, not the vSphere Management Interface, all right? 00:01:15.180 --> 00:01:24.279 To be clear, again, the vSphere Management Interface is for managing vSphere, it's for managing the host, it's for managing the virtual machines and all the things related to that. 00:01:24.279 --> 00:01:32.839 The vCenter Server Management Interface, this is for managing the vCenter Server itself, like the IP address of the vCenter Server, for example. 00:01:32.839 --> 00:01:43.040 And for that, you're going to go to HTTPS colon slash slash either the IP address or the fully qualified domain name of the vCenter Server. 00:01:43.040 --> 00:01:50.139 So the same thing you would have accessed to manage vSphere, but you're going to add a port number of colon 5480. 00:01:50.139 --> 00:02:00.139 So that 5480 means we're going to go into a different web interface, right, that's going to allow us to manage this virtual appliance versus our vSphere environment. 00:02:00.139 --> 00:02:05.739 So the login to this, normally the credentials are going to be root and then whatever password you configure for root. 00:02:05.739 --> 00:02:12.880 You can also create additional accounts for managing this, but by default, the first time you're going to log in with root and whatever that root password is. 00:02:15.600 --> 00:02:21.979 So as you can see, now we are in the interface for managing the vCenter virtual appliance. 00:02:21.979 --> 00:02:30.539 And the first thing we have here is monitor, so we can see how much CPU is being used by this virtual appliance, how much memory, disk, if we're getting errors on something, right? 00:02:30.539 --> 00:02:32.600 We can see all the utilization on there. 00:02:32.600 --> 00:02:37.600 So from here, we can say, oh, wow, you know, the CPU usage on this vCenter Server is really high. 00:02:37.600 --> 00:02:48.500 When I deployed it, I deployed a tiny, think I'm only going to have three or four hosts, but I've actually ended up deploying 15 hosts and I have all these VMs and I just way undersized my vCenter Server. 00:02:48.500 --> 00:03:00.440 So maybe I need to either, you know, bump up the CPU and the RAM on this, or maybe I want to redeploy vCenter and, you know, size it correctly and migrate a bunch of things over. 00:03:00.440 --> 00:03:03.839 It depends on how much I've got configured and how complicated that would be for me, right? 00:03:06.440 --> 00:03:10.179 So access, how do I want to allow access? 00:03:10.179 --> 00:03:17.100 This isn't necessarily saying what level of access, it's not permissions, it's saying how do I want it to be accessed. 00:03:17.100 --> 00:03:19.940 So, for example, do I want to allow SSH access? 00:03:19.940 --> 00:03:26.500 Do I want to allow access to the DCUI, which is going to be like basically console access to the virtual appliance? 00:03:26.500 --> 00:03:28.899 Do we want to allow CLI access? 00:03:28.899 --> 00:03:31.440 Do we want to enable the bash shell, right? 00:03:31.440 --> 00:03:39.699 So how do we want to allow this device to be managed is what they're trying to configure, or, you know, options are giving you right here with that access. 00:03:39.699 --> 00:03:45.699 So it's not saying what you can and cannot do, it's saying how you can access it to do those things. 00:03:45.699 --> 00:03:52.199 So networking, this is where I'm going to configure the network adapter with an IP address, subnet mask, default gateway, all that configuration there. 00:03:52.199 --> 00:03:57.399 If for some reason I can't, you know, access the internet from it or something like that, do I configure the gateway right? 00:03:57.399 --> 00:03:58.639 Do I configure DNS right? 00:03:58.639 --> 00:03:59.639 You know, what's going on with that? 00:03:59.639 --> 00:04:02.300 I can look at those under network here. 00:04:02.300 --> 00:04:09.039 So firewall, I can go in there, I can create, edit, delete any firewall rules that I may need. 00:04:09.039 --> 00:04:15.740 Maybe you have certain rules about accessing certain subnets or access from certain subnets if you want to configure firewall rules right here. 00:04:15.740 --> 00:04:21.000 It probably is often will be done on your actual physical, you know, Palo firewall or something like that. 00:04:21.000 --> 00:04:32.239 But maybe you have a policy that says local firewalls must be enabled and must have certain configurations for maybe for various levels of certification and things like that that you require from your organization. 00:04:32.239 --> 00:04:39.000 So time, here you can go in there and say if you want to enable NTP and configure the options like that on there. 00:04:39.000 --> 00:04:41.739 So services, you know, what services do you want to go in there? 00:04:41.739 --> 00:04:49.839 Here you can go in and start and stop different services or if a service isn't working quite right, you're in a problem, it's not responding, something like that, 00:04:49.839 --> 00:04:52.799 you can restart a service from here. 00:04:52.799 --> 00:04:58.839 So this is kind of just services, you know, applet on a Windows box, very similar. 00:04:58.839 --> 00:05:03.140 So update, so here what's going to happen is you can go in and you can tell the check for updates. 00:05:03.140 --> 00:05:04.980 It'll show you what updates are available. 00:05:04.980 --> 00:05:11.279 So maybe you're running version 8.0 and you want to move to 8.0 update 1. 00:05:11.279 --> 00:05:19.200 What will happen is you can check for updates here if 8.1 is available or 8.0 update 1 is available. 00:05:19.200 --> 00:05:20.299 You can download it. 00:05:20.299 --> 00:05:25.200 You can deploy it here to vCenter and once you've deployed the update to vCenter here, 00:05:25.200 --> 00:05:35.700 then you can go into the vSphere management interface and you can check your host update manager and you should see that same update available there. 00:05:35.700 --> 00:05:38.440 You cannot update the host until you've updated vSphere. 00:05:38.440 --> 00:05:42.500 You always update your vCenter server first and then you update your host. 00:05:42.500 --> 00:05:48.700 So from update here is where you can get that update to update the vCenter server. 00:05:48.700 --> 00:05:51.899 Syslog, it can be configured from there, pretty obvious right here. 00:05:51.899 --> 00:05:58.000 We can set up, we want to configure 40 for syslog servers and remote syslog server views. 00:05:58.000 --> 00:06:01.299 So backups, this last option here is where you can configure backups. 00:06:01.299 --> 00:06:07.000 You can configure a backup schedule when you want things to backup and you can say where you want them to backup to. 00:06:07.000 --> 00:06:09.000 It can't backup to the local appliance. 00:06:09.000 --> 00:06:11.299 It's going to have to have a backup target configured. 00:06:11.299 --> 00:06:15.899 The target can be HTTPS, FTP, NFS, SMB. 00:06:15.899 --> 00:06:17.500 I'm pretty sure there's an option on there too. 00:06:17.500 --> 00:06:23.399 You can choose different network targets where you want the backups to go, but it has to have a target to go to. 00:06:23.399 --> 00:06:29.100 You can't backup to the device itself and then try to use SCP to copy it off later or something like that. 00:06:29.100 --> 00:06:30.600 You've got to point to a backup target. 00:06:30.600 --> 00:06:36.899 So you should have something configured for the backups to go to before you come to here and try to backup. 00:06:36.899 --> 00:06:42.700 All right, before we wrap this up, let's go ahead and go to our demo and let's look at the vSphere appliance. 00:06:42.700 --> 00:06:50.600 So here we are in our vCenter server management server, not the vSphere management, but vCenter. 00:06:50.600 --> 00:06:57.000 And we can tell because we have this 5480 at the end of our address for vCenter. 00:06:57.000 --> 00:07:02.600 So I'm going to go ahead and log in as root here. 00:07:02.600 --> 00:07:06.500 All right, so when you first log into here, this is what you're going to see, right? 00:07:06.500 --> 00:07:09.200 It tells you a quick summary of the system. 00:07:09.200 --> 00:07:12.600 You know, if there's any alerts you need to be aware of, most things look good. 00:07:12.600 --> 00:07:14.899 There's an alert on the memory on there. 00:07:14.899 --> 00:07:16.200 Appliance is running low on memory. 00:07:16.200 --> 00:07:19.200 Maybe I need to go in there and bump up the memory in the virtual appliance. 00:07:19.200 --> 00:07:25.100 Since there's not really much in there, I really shouldn't have too much of a problem with RAM. 00:07:25.100 --> 00:07:29.000 Under monitor, I can say, well, why do I have a memory problem? 00:07:29.000 --> 00:07:34.299 I can go in there and look down here and say, oh, because I'm using almost 100% of the RAM I have configured on here. 00:07:34.299 --> 00:07:35.799 Here's my CPU usage. 00:07:35.799 --> 00:07:37.200 That's not too bad in general. 00:07:37.200 --> 00:07:41.399 It's getting a little high right here, but maybe it'll drop down here pretty soon. 00:07:41.399 --> 00:07:47.399 But the memory usage has been high the entire time, and high memory usage can also increase your CPU usage, too. 00:07:47.399 --> 00:07:50.500 So that might be, you know, indicative of a problem. 00:07:50.500 --> 00:08:01.899 We can look at our disks, and you can see vCenter creates a lot of different hard drives. 00:08:01.899 --> 00:08:04.899 There's ones for the operating system and different logs go to different places. 00:08:04.899 --> 00:08:07.000 Here's one for auto-deploy, right? 00:08:07.000 --> 00:08:12.200 I can look at my network. 00:08:12.200 --> 00:08:14.799 Here I can select different services that are running on there, right? 00:08:14.799 --> 00:08:18.200 I can see, you know, any kind of network performance issues on those. 00:08:18.200 --> 00:08:24.500 My databases and space looks just fine. 00:08:24.500 --> 00:08:27.500 Don't have too much issue there because this is a brand-new vCenter. 00:08:27.500 --> 00:08:29.700 Again, not much in there, so I don't have to worry about that. 00:08:29.700 --> 00:08:32.299 And then, of course, any kind of logs. 00:08:32.299 --> 00:08:38.900 I can go in there and create a support bundle from here and send this to VMware if I have any, you know, problems, you know, something. 00:08:38.900 --> 00:08:40.799 This is one of the first things they usually ask for. 00:08:40.799 --> 00:08:49.700 When I open a support ticket with VMware, I now just right away go in and get support bundles and send them right over before I even submit the ticket or when I submit the ticket, 00:08:49.700 --> 00:08:55.000 you know, brand-new because I know they're going to ask for it, and that just saves me from, you know, 00:08:55.000 --> 00:08:59.599 an interaction where they're going to send me, not just asking for it, it's already there. 00:08:59.599 --> 00:09:01.200 So here is that access. 00:09:01.200 --> 00:09:09.299 I can say if I want to allow, you know, SSH access, DCUI, console CLI, bash shell access. 00:09:09.299 --> 00:09:15.299 I can go in and make changes to that just by going to edit, and I can turn things on and off. 00:09:15.299 --> 00:09:16.099 Networking. 00:09:16.099 --> 00:09:22.500 Here's where I can go in there and change the IP address or gateway or whatever's on here. 00:09:22.500 --> 00:09:27.599 Click on edit for that adapter. 00:09:27.599 --> 00:09:34.099 Here I can see my host name, my DNS, right, my NIC0 information. 00:09:34.099 --> 00:09:36.099 Right here I'm using DHCP. 00:09:36.099 --> 00:09:37.700 I can say I want it to be static. 00:09:37.700 --> 00:09:45.299 In a real production environment, this would be a static configuration, not DHCP. 00:09:45.299 --> 00:09:46.200 Firewall settings. 00:09:46.200 --> 00:09:47.900 So I want to go in there and look at any firewall settings. 00:09:47.900 --> 00:09:49.599 I want to create or add firewall rules. 00:09:49.599 --> 00:09:51.200 I can do that from here. 00:09:51.200 --> 00:09:53.500 Time, I want to configure NTP. 00:09:53.500 --> 00:09:58.400 Here's the time zone I'm in, and do I want to go in there and enable NTP? 00:09:58.400 --> 00:10:03.200 Let's say I want to enable NTP, and then I can say, you know, the name of the time zone, 00:10:03.200 --> 00:10:05.700 pool.ntp.org or something like that. 00:10:05.700 --> 00:10:08.299 I can also say I want it to sync up with the host. 00:10:08.299 --> 00:10:13.500 Because it's a VM, I can say just use the time that's on the host, and the host can use NTP, right? 00:10:13.500 --> 00:10:17.900 And then my VM should still be, you know, pretty much the same. 00:10:18.000 --> 00:10:22.500 Under services, here's where I can go in and stop or restart services. 00:10:22.500 --> 00:10:25.900 If I have a service that's causing some kind of a problem or, you know, giving me a problem, 00:10:25.900 --> 00:10:29.799 I can go in there and find it, and just restart individual services from here. 00:10:29.799 --> 00:10:34.099 All I got to do is go in there, select the service, and I can say if I want to start it. 00:10:34.099 --> 00:10:38.599 If it's already started, I can restart it or stop it. 00:10:38.599 --> 00:10:39.099 Update. 00:10:39.099 --> 00:10:43.299 This is where you probably go kind of the most often, because you probably don't go in here a ton. 00:10:43.299 --> 00:10:45.400 Hopefully your logs are going to a syslog server. 00:10:45.400 --> 00:10:49.900 If you don't have any issues, you can get to your logs and make sure you don't have issues with your syslog server. 00:10:49.900 --> 00:10:56.500 So if you are coming into here, a lot of times it's because you want to check for updates or push out updates. 00:10:56.500 --> 00:11:02.000 You know, you know, the newest 8.0 update 3 just got released recently, 00:11:02.000 --> 00:11:04.599 so you want to update to that most current version. 00:11:04.599 --> 00:11:06.000 You can come into here. 00:11:06.000 --> 00:11:08.200 It will, you can tell it to check for updates. 00:11:08.200 --> 00:11:12.099 Right now, we don't have a good internet connection here, so it's probably going to run a little slow. 00:11:12.099 --> 00:11:16.700 If I find the update, I can click on it and push out the vCenter update. 00:11:16.700 --> 00:11:20.000 Then I can go in and update my hosts. 00:11:20.000 --> 00:11:26.299 Under administration, I can set password policies and say if my password is set to expire or not. 00:11:26.299 --> 00:11:29.099 Here's where I can go in there and configure my logging. 00:11:29.099 --> 00:11:38.200 I can configure my syslog server here, right, the address, if I'm using TLS or not, what port number I want to go to. 00:11:38.200 --> 00:11:43.099 And then the last thing is this is where you would go in and configure and run a backup. 00:11:43.099 --> 00:11:46.500 You can configure backups to run, or you can do a manual backup now.