Vsphere 6.5

Introduction The VMware vCenter Support Assistant is a free plugin made available by VMware in the form of a virtual appliance. After deploying the appliance, it can be registered to vSphere SSO and you can authorise one or more vCenter Servers to Support Assistant. Support Assistant provides the following benefits: Reactive support. You can use the Support Assistant plugin in the vSphere Web Client to easily create new service requests (SRs), as it is essentially a front end to the MyVMware portal. The big benefit of lodging the SR through Support Assistant is that you get the chance to automatically gather logs for different entities in your environment and these logs are automatically generated and uploaded to VMware as a background task. You can also manage existing SRs through support assistant to add comments, upload files or generate more logs ...

The post below will walk through the deployment of an embedded vCenter Server Appliance 6.5 using the GUI installer, where the PSC and VC roles are installed on the same servers. This deployment model is perfect for smaller environment where Enhanced Linked Mode is not required. The PSC Topology Decision Tree is a great read if you aren’t sure on how you should deploy these core components given your requirements. If you are interested in also seeing other GUI/CLI deployments, please see my post here which has links off to other individual articles for different deployment methods. ...

The post below will walk through the deployment of an embedded vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 6.5 node to a target ESXi server using the command line interface (CLI) deployment method. If you are interested in also seeing the GUI deployment or other GUI/CLI deployments, please see my post here which has links off to other individual articles for different deployment methods. For each of the deployment methods I am providing a video as well. Please find the video for the VCSA Embedded CLI deployment below. This has been recorded in FullHD, so best to watch it in Full Screen! ...

The post below will walk through the deployment of an external vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 6.5 node and Platform Services Controller (PSC) to a target ESXi server using the command line interface (CLI) deployment method. If you are interested in also seeing the GUI deployment or other GUI/CLI deployments, please see my post here which has links off to other individual articles for different deployment methods. For each of the deployment methods I am providing a video as well. Please find the video for the VCSA External CLI deployment below. This has been recorded in FullHD, so best to watch it in Full Screen! ...

Just a quick note on something I spotted as I’ve been working through some blog posts for vSphere 6.5. It looks like you can now upload files for a Support Request to VMware directly from the vSphere Web Client. KB 1008525 lists some of the main methods for uploading diagnostic information to VMware including using the Support Assistant (which I am planning to do a post on), FTP and email. It does not yet contain information for this new feature in vSphere 6.5, but it is documented here. ...