VCP 5 – Objective 4.1 – Create and Deploy Virtual Machines

Identify capabilities of virtual machine hardware versions

• 8 – ESXi 5 – ability for up to 1TB of RAM and 32 vCPUs – 3D graphics and HD Audio, SmartCard Reader, USB 3, new driver for e1000.
• 7 – ESXi 4 – ability for 255 GB RAM and 8 vCPUs – Introduced CBT, VM Hotplug, VMXNET 3, IDE Virtual Devices, SAS Virtual Devices.
• 4 – ESX 3.x – ability for 64 GB of RAM (3.5), 16 GB RAM (3.0) and 4 vCPUs

Identify VMware Tools device drivers

• SVGA Driver – Enables 32-bit displays, high display resolution and faster graphics performance.  On windows based systems who are vista or later the VMware SVGA 3D (WDDM) driver is installed to support Aero.
• SCSI Driver – If you specify to use a BusLogic Adapter, the guest OS uses this driver.  Some recent guest OSes will contain LSI Logic Parallel or SAS.
• Paravirtual SCSI Driver – used for pvscsi adapters
• VMXNet drivers – vmxnet and vmxnet3 drivers improve networking performance.
• Mouse Driver – improves mouse performance.  This driver is required if you are going to use terminal services.
• Audio Driver 
• Kernel module for sharing folders – called hgfs.sys on windows and vmhgfs on Linux.  Used to share folders between hosts and guests. (in fusion or workstation).
• ThinPrint Driver – used to add printers assigned to the host to the virtual machines.
• Memory Control Driver – Use this, otherwise memory performance may be hindered.
• Modules and Drivers that support making automatic backups – VSS modules for Windows vista and up.  Filesystem sync driver for others.
• VMCI – used for more efficient communication between virtual machines.

• You need to download and install the Client Integration Plug-In to use the console in the web client
• There are a few configurable options in the web client with regards to the console.
  • Guest OS lock (*) – Locks the remote console after the last remote user disconnects.
  • Max Number of Sessions – Limits the simultaneous connections to the VM.

Identify virtual machine storage resources

• .vmx – Virtual machine configuration File
• .vmxf – Additional VM Config File
• .vmdk – Virtual disk characteristics
• -flat.vmdk – preallocated virtual disk
• .nvram – BIOS config
• .vmsd – snapshot database
• .vmsn – snapshot data file
• .vswp – swap file
• .vmss – VM suspend file
• .log – log file
• #.log – old log files.

1. Right click your target object and select 'New Virtual Machine'.
2. Select a configuration option for the VM.
   • Typical – allows you specify
     • VM name and inventory location
     • Location to place the VM
     • Datastore to store the files.
     • Guest OS and Version
     • Parameter for virtual disk size and provisioning settings.
   • Custom
     • Includes everything from typical as well as
     • VM version (hardware version)
     • Number of vCPUs and Memory size
     • Number of NICs, Network to connect to and adapter type
     • SCSI Controller type
     • Disk type (new, existing, RDM, or no disk)
3. Enter a name and location for the VM.  Name can be 80 characters long and must be unique within folders they are stored.  Location is a folder within your datacenter.
4. Specify a host/cluster to host the VM, then specify a resource pool
5. Select a datastore or datastore cluster to store the VM files on.  You can also disable Storage DRS at this point and point directly to a datastore within a datastore cluster.  Optionally as well you can select a VM Storage Profile..
6. Select a Virtual Machine Hardware version (options are version 7 and 8).
7. Select your OS.
8. Select your number of CPUs and your cores per socket.
9. Select the amount of memory to give the VM.  Sliders indicate Minimum, default, Maximum, Max for best performance, and max total recommended memory
10. Select  number NICs to add and the corresponding network and adapter type associated with them as well as if they are connected at power on or not.
11. Select your SCSI Controller type
    • BusLogic Parallel
    • LSI Logic Parallel
    • LSI Logic SAS
    • VMware Paravirtual
12. Select  your disk type (New, Existing, RDM, or no disk)  Continue to select disk provisioning options (thick lazy zero, thick eager zero, or thin) as well as select another datastore for the disk if you want.
    • Thick Lazy Zeroed
      • All disk space is allocated up front but only the space needed immediately is provisioned.  The remaining space on the disk will be zeroed out on first write.
    • Thick Eager Zeroed
      • All disk space is allocated and zeroed out up front.
    • Thin
      • Uses only as much space as the disk needs and is allocated more on demand up to it's capacity.
13. Select your advanced options.  The device node can be changed, as well as the disk mode (Independent).  Independent disks are not affected by snapshots and there are two types of independent disks.
    • Persistent – changes are immediately and permanently written to disk
    • Nonpersistent – changes to the disk are discarded when powered off.
14. DONE!

1. Right click the VM and select Edit Settings
2. Click disk on the resource tab
3. Set the Shares value Low(500), Normal (1000), High(2000), or custom
4. Select the Limit – IOps field and enter in the upper bound for IOPs
5. DONE

1. Either from the console menu of the VM Select VM->Guest-> Install/Upgrade VMware tools or Right click the VM and select Guest -> Install/Upgrade VMware Tools.
2. Chose whether to do an interactive or automatic installation.  (automatic will reboot the VM)
3. Follow through the wizard.  Included within the VMware Tools installation is the following
   • Drivers
     • explained above.
   • VMware Tools Service
     • Passes messages between hosts and guests
     • Runs scripts that help automate guest operations (ran when power state changes).
     • Synchronizes Time in the guest with the host.
     • Allows pointer to move freely from console to the client OS.
     • helps create the quiesced snapshots
     • Sends heartbeats to host to indicate system is running
   • VMware User Process
     • Copy/Paste and Drag/Drop.
4. When prompted, reboot the VM. 

• Within the GUI on the guest select the options tab on the VMware Tools Property box.
• Check/Uncheck the option labeled 'Time Synchronization between the VMs and the ESX Server"

Using the VMware Tools configuration utility.

This is a command line interface that you can use to modify VMware tools settings.  To setup time synchronization do the following

• navigate to the VMware Tools installation folder and execute one of the following commands
• VMwareToolboxCmd timesync status -displays the status of the time sync (enabled or disabled)
• VmwareToolboxCmd timesync enable or disable – enable or disable timesync

You can disable timesync completely by adding the following lines to the vmx file of the VM.

tools.syncTime = "FALSE"

1. Install the VMware converter standalone on a machine.  See the guide for supported OSes as it is too lengthy to list here.  Start the wizard and select 'Convert Machine'
2. Select your source machine.  There are a few other options for this.
   • Be sure that the converter standalone server has network access to the source machine
   • Turn off the firewall on the source machine
   • Disable simple file sharing on the source.
   • make sure that no other conversion job is running against the source.
   • If you have any Converter 3.x on the source, un install them.
   • You will need to select whether the source is local (the machine you are on) or remote (provide IP and OS type.)
   • This step will install the converter standalone agent on the source machine.
   • If source is a Linux machine, be sure to use the root account.  Also, be sure you are using GRUB as LILO is not supported.
3. Select a destination for the new VM.  There are in turn a couple of destinations.
   • Managed Destination (ESX/ESXi)
     • Select VMware Infrastructure virtual machine as the destination type.
     • Provide IP or host name along with credentials of the host or vCenter server.
     • Give the new VM a name and select a folder (if using vCenter) to store it in.
     • You can now customize the location of the VM by selecting and host, resource pool or a cluster.  If using DPM with the cluster you should temporarily set it to manual to avoid a host from being powered off during the conversion.
     • Select a datastore to store the files on.
     • Select the VM version (hardware).
   • Hosted Destination (workstation, fusion, server, or player).
     • Select VMware Workstation or other VMware virtual machine.
     • Select the correct target for the VM in the VMware product box.
     • Provide a name for the VM
     • Specify a location to store the files (can be a remote path '\\server\c$\" or a local path c:\
     • Provide user credentials if using network path.
4. Configure the hardware of the destination VM
   • Select your data copy type.  Options include
     • Copy all disks and maintain layout – basically disk based cloning.
     • Select volumes to copy – volume based cloning, performed at file or block level.
     • Linked Clone – creates the VM that shares the disk with the source machine.  available only on hosted sources and hosted destinations.
   • Resize Volume – allows you to resize the disks.  Options include
     • Maintain size
     • Min size – copies only used space
     • Type size in GB – max 999GB
     • Type size in MB – max 999GB
   • You also have the options to add, remove and move disks around at this point as well as perform disk alignment as well.
   • Edit the number of processors and cores.
   • Allocate memory for the VM
   • Specify a disk controller (SCSI BusLogic, IDE, LSI Logic, LSI Logic SAS)
   • Configure the network settings.
5. Configure Guest Software
   • Customize the Guest OS (identity, computer name, domain, etc).
   • Chose whether to install VMware tools inside the Guest OS.
6. Configure conversion job
   • Chose whether to remove system restore checkpoints (speeds up conversion).
   • Chose whether to stop certain services on the source machine during the conversion
   • Chose startup mode for destination services.
   • Chose whether to power off source and power on destination after conversion.
   • Limit conversion resources.
   • Chose whether to remove the agent after conversion
7. DONE

• VMware Virtual Machines, backup images, and third-party VMs such as workstation, and server
• VCB
• Acronis TrueImage
• Microsoft Virtual PC
• Virtual Server
• Symantec Backup Exec Server Recovery (live state recovery).
• StorageCraft
• Parallels Desktop/Workstation
• Norton Ghost (only sv2i).

• Verify VMware tools is installed on every VM on the host.
• Compare the CPU of all VMs on the host or resource pool using a stacked bar chart.
• Determine whether high ready time is resulted from a CPU limit, if so, increase the limit
• Increase the shares to give VM more opportunities to run.  If host ready time doesn't decrease (since it is constrained) increase CPU reservations for high priority machines.
• Decrease the number of vCPUs
• increase memory allocated to VM.  This should in turn decrease disk and network activity for apps that cache.
• If the VM is not in a DRS cluster, add it to one.  If it is, increase the number of hosts or migrate one ore more VMs off of the host.
• Upgrade the physical CPUs or cores on the host
• Use the newest version of vSphere and enable CPU saving features like TCP segmentation offload, large memory pages, and jumbo frames.

• Again, verify VMware tools is installed.  The balloon driver is included with the tools and is critical to performance.
• Verify that the balloon driver is enabled.
• Reduce the memory space on the VM and correct cache size if it is too big.
• If reservations is set to a value much higher than it's active memory, decrease this reservation so the vmkernel can reclaim the idle memory for other VMs
• Migrate 1 or more VMs to another host.
• Add Physical memory.

• Vlance
  • an emulated version of the AMD PCnet32 Lance.  This is an older 10MBps NIC with drivers for most 32 bit systems except Vista and later.
• VMXNET
  • No physical counterpart, optimized for performance in a VM, needs VMware Tools
• VMXNET 2 (Enhanced)
  • Like VMXNET but provides high-performance features such as jumbo frames and hardware offloads.  Only available for some OSes and must be on ESX 3.5 or later.
• VMXNET 3
  • Next generation of paravirtualized NIC designed for performance.  All the features that VMXNET 2 had but adds multiqueue support (Receive side scaling), IPv6 offloads, and MSI/MSI-X interrupt delivery.  Supported only on hardware version 7 and later
• Flexible
  • Identifies itself as a VLANCE during boot, but initializes as a vlance or vmxnet  after the driver is initialized.  If VMware tools is installed, it will be a vmxnet.
• E1000
  • Emulated version of Intel 82545EM.
• E1000e
  • Emulates a new model of the Intel GB adapters.  Only available on hardware version 8 in vSphere 5

• CMDS/s – Number of IOPS being sent to or coming from the device or VM.
• DAVG/cmd – Average response time in milliseconds per command being sent to the device
• KAVG/cmd – amount of time the command spends in the VMkernel
• GAVG/cmd – response time as it is perceived by the guest OS. (DAVG + KAVG)

Once you determine the requirements for your VM, one could use VM Storage Profiles to ensure that VMs are on their intended disks, even with Storage DRS enabled.