Kyle Ruddy —www.thatcouldbeaproblem.com
Steve Flanders —sflanders.net
Paul Braren —www.tinkertry.com
David Hanacek —transformation.emc2.at
Abdullah Abdullah —notes.doodzzz.net
Finally, I’d like to thank the VMware community as a whole. To all the bloggers, speakers, tweeters, and podcasters: without you all, I would never have started down this road.
About the Author
Nick Marshall is an integration architect with over 15 years’ IT experience. He holds multiple advanced IT certifications, including VMware Certified Advanced Professional 5 – Datacenter Administrator (VCAP5-DCA) and VMware Certified Advanced Professional 5 – Datacenter Design (VCAP5-DCD). He is currently working for VMware in the SDDC Design and Test engineering group.
Previously, Nick has worked in a number of roles, ranging from computer assembler, to infrastructure architect, to product manager. Nick loves to solve business problems with technical solutions.
Outside of his day job, Nick continues to work on his passion for virtualization by helping run the most popular virtualization podcast, vBrownBag, writing on his personal blog, at www.nickmarshall.com.au, and writing how-to articles on www.labguides.com. You can also find him speaking at industry conferences such as VMUG (VMware User Group) and PEX (Partner Exchange). To recognize his contributions to the VMware community, Nick has been awarded the vExpert award for 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015.
Nick lives with his wife Natalie and son Ethan in Palo Alto, California.
About the Contributors
The following individuals also contributed to this book.
Grant Orchard (Chapters 5, 7, 8, 11, and 12) is a systems engineer for VMware, focusing on their Cloud Automation portfolio. He is an active member of the Australian virtualization community and has been involved with the local chapters of the VMUG and vBrownbag community podcasts.
Grants holds the VMware Certified Advanced Professional 5 Design and Administration certifications for both Datacenter Virtualization (VCA-DCD, VCAP-DCA) and Cloud (VCAP-CIA, VCAP-CID).
He recently became a father for the second time and, despite the sleep deprivation, loves to get quality time with his wife Liz and two children, all of whom have been incredibly patient with the time he has spent working on this book. When he’s not trying the latest fad diet, he blogs at grantorchard.com and engages with the virtualization community on Twitter (@grantorchard).
Josh Atwell (Chapter 14) is a Cloud Architect at SolidFire, focused on integration with automation platforms and management tools. He has worked hard for over a decade to allow little pieces of code to do his work for him. Now he focuses on building code and tools to help others. Josh has been highly active in the virtualization and datacenter communities, where he can be seen regularly on podcasts such as Engineers Unplugged and vBrownBag, and as a co-host of the VUPaaS podcast. He also still works actively with various technical user groups.
Never known for lacking an opinion, he blogs at vtesseract.com and talks shop on Twitter as @Josh_Atwell. When not working, he enjoys spending time with his three children and his supportive wife Stephanie.
Foreword
When I handed off the Mastering VMware vSphere series of books to Nick Marshall with Mastering VMware vSphere 5.5, Nick invited me to write the foreword for that version of the book. In that foreword, I shared the story of how Mastering VMware vSphere 4 and Mastering VMware vSphere 5 had come to be, and why I’d felt it necessary to “pay it forward” by giving someone else (Nick, in this case) the same opportunity I’d been given. Having me write the foreword made sense in a lot of ways; it was like passing the torch.
However, when Nick asked me to also write the foreword for the next edition – the book you now hold in your hands – I was truly honored. At the same time, though, I was also a bit stumped. What should I write? What should I say? What can be said that hasn’t already been said?
Mastering VMware vSphere 6 is more than just a new version of a well-respected tome, because Nick has done more than just refresh the material found within these pages. Yes, you’ll find in-depth coverage of new features in vSphere 6; that includes features like long-distance vMotion and cross-vCenter vMotion, a new version of VSAN, and the long-awaited SMP Fault Tolerance that will allow you to use VMware Fault Tolerance with up to four virtual CPUs. Yes, you’ll find coverage of NFS 4.1 support, Virtual Volumes, and a new version of Network I/O Control. Of course, there is so much more in vSphere 6 than just what I’ve mentioned here, but you’ll have to read the rest of the book to find out what else is included!
What you’ll also find is a new contributing author (welcome, Grant!) that demonstrates Nick’s commitment to also “pay it forward.” You’ll find evidence of broader community involvement, through Nick’s inclusion of a variety of vExpert technical reviewers in addition to Jason Boche’s always-exemplary technical editing. It’s refreshing to see the community, to which authors like myself and Nick owe so much, being brought into this process. This is exactly what I’d hoped would happen, and I’m so thankful to see it come to pass.
As I said in the previous edition of this book, I’m confident you’ll find this book to continue to be the “go-to” book for vSphere 6. I’m thrilled to see vSphere 6 get released, and I’m equally thrilled to see Mastering VMware vSphere 6 hit the shelves. Readers, you are in for a treat.
Nick, congratulations! You’ve taken a solid foundation from previous editions of the book – which I, in turn, built on top of outstanding work done by Chris McCain with Mastering VMware Infrastructure 3– and you’ve made it your own. I look forward to seeing where you take it next.
Introduction
Back in 2005 I was trying to convince my boss that we should use GSX Server on our shiny new DL385. To him, it was a hard sell. He didn’t understand why on earth we should install two operating systems onto a server – ”It’ll just slow it down!” he exclaimed in his Aussie accent. So I went ahead and started experimenting with VMware software on my desktop computer. Luckily at the time I had a workstation capable of running such things.
The times have changed quite a bit since then, and now virtualization – especially server virtualization – is readily embraced in corporate datacenters worldwide. VMware has gone from a relatively small vendor to one of the industry heavyweights, garnering a commanding share of the server virtualization market with its top-notch virtualization products. Even now, while other companies such as Microsoft, Red Hat, and Citrix have jumped into the server virtualization space, it’s still VMware that’s almost synonymous with virtualization. For all intents and purposes, VMware invented the market.
If you’re reading this, though, there’s a chance you’re just now starting to learn about virtualization. What is virtualization, and why is it important to you?
I define virtualization as the abstraction of one computing resource from another computing resource. Consider storage virtualization; in this case, you are abstracting servers (one computing resource) from the storage to which they are connected (another computing