Personal knowledge blog/portal for Virtualization, Storage, Linux and Automation
At work, there was a requirement to upload an ISO to the vSphere Content Library in an automated fashion (no GUI).
With PowerCLI 11, New-ContentLibrary commandlet seemed to do the job and creates and uploads the ISO file.
However, it creates and uploads the file as type: ‘file’
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New-ContentLibraryItem -ContentLibrary vgnosis_cl -Name $item -Files $file_name |
The purpose of this document is to go through the installation of the Platform Services Controller PSC version 6.5, as part 1 of the vCenter Server (Appliance) deployment with an external PSC.
vCenter Server and the vCenter Server components are deployed on one system, and the services included in the Platform Services Controller are deployed on another system.
The following components are included in the vCenter Server and vCenter Server Appliance installations:
For more information about vSphere 6.5 please refer to the official VMware vSphere documentation here.
For What is Νew in vSphere 6.5 click here.
Let’s start with the installation of the external PSC.
Download the VMware vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 ISO from VMware downloads.
You will see below that the VCSA installer has changed dramatically, it’s a lot cleaner, simpler, and many deployment options (install, upgrade, migrate, restore) are bundled into the same one installer.
Let’s do it.
The main reason behind building a Lab at Home, like many others also do, is to help me study and learn.
The specification of the hardware I used for the Lab can be found here.
To give you a better understanding of the setup and the nesting that is happening, I have drawn the below diagram. You can see that everything is on a single physical machine running VMware ESXi 6.0 U2, and the picture below represents the logical design of my lab. A physical switch, a physical server, and everything else virtual.
Logical Design
The Main Lab “Infrastructure” Setup
Let’s outline what our basic infrastructure components will be for the Lab.
| Hostname | OS | Description | Hardware |
| vgnosisesx01 | Vmware ESXi 6.0U2 | vGnosis Physical ESXi Host | HP Proliant DL360 G7 |
| vgnosis2k01 | Windows 2012 R2 | vGnosis Domain Controller and DNS | Virtual Machine |
| vgnosisvap01 | Virtual Appliance – SLES 11 | vGnosis PSC (Platform Services Controller) | Virtual Machine |
| vgnosisvap02 | Virtual Appliance – SLES 11 | vGnosis VCSA (vCenter Server Appliance) | Virtual Machine |
| vgnosis2k03 | Windows 2012 R2 | vGnosis VUM (Vmware Update Manager) | Virtual Machine |
| sw01 | Cisco IOS | vGnosis Cisco Switch | Cisco WS-C3750E-48PD |
At work, we have deployed a PSC / VCSA 6U1 in Singapore, and linked it to our London PSC on the same domain,
so we can use Enhannced Linked Mode.
Below diagram diagram describes the PSC / VCSA deployment.
Tried to logon to VCSA01 which is in our London vSphere and it took 10 minutes for the web client to load.
VCSA02 which is in Singapore appeared on the screen and couldn’t be expanded.
Hosts and Clusters on VCSA01 didn’t show any tabs. So, Web Client wasn’t responding as it should, and couldn’t do any work.
c# client worked OK.
As soon as we powered off PSC02 / VCSA02, Web client started responding as it should.
It seems that PSC replication is affected by high latency, which in our case is ~ 200ms.
Question here is why VMware or any of the nice blogs around hasn’t got any maximum latency numbers around PSC replication.
We have based a design around Enhanced Linked Mode with our upgrade to vsphere 6 around the globe, if latency is an issue we need to change everything.
The Kit I use for my Lab:
PHYSICAL SERVER:
HP Proliant DL360 G7
Specs:
CPU Cores: 12 CPUs x 2.666 GHz
Processor Type: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5650 @2.67GHz
Processor Sockets: 2
Cores per Socket: 6
Logical Processors: 24
Hyperthreading: Active
Number of NICs: 4
Memory: 288GB (16x16384MB @1333MHz
SWITCH:
Cisco Catalyst 3750E-48 2x10GE
HOME ROUTER:
TP-Link Archer C7 AC1750
