vCenter

When accessing vCenter through the vSphere Client you will find all objects in the inventory by name, such as VM-01, ESXi-01, Datastore-01. These objects also have an internal identifier that is being used by software when logging information about these objects and you might also need those identifiers when using commands. Especially when using NSX many commands that you can execute from the NSX Manager Central CLI require the use of the identifiers.

Normally updating a vCenter server appliance is as simple as accessing the VAMI interface on port :5480 and have the appliance download it's own update form the default update URL. And when that's not possible you can always just download the ISO-file and mount that on your vCenter server appliance.

The vSphere Client and vSphere Web Client in the vCenter Appliance both have a timeout of 120 minutes. NSX-T has a timeout of 30 minutes. When I am teaching VMware classes the client always has just timed out when I want to demonstrate something to my students and I then have to re-login. So therefor I always configure the timeout to 0 (no timeout) at the start of each class. It is documented here how to do that:

An updated version of this article can be found here: http://www.anjabastiaansen.nl/moid

With the release of vSphere 6.5 VMware has introduced a new method for creating a backup of the vCenter Appliance. This method is available from the vCenter Appliance web management interface on port 5480 (https://applianceaddress:5480). In this article I will explain how to create a backup and what the restore procedure is.

With the release of vSphere 6.5 VMware has introduced a new method for creating a backup of the vCenter Appliance. This method is available from the vCenter Appliance web management interface on port 5480 (https://applianceaddress:5480).

Tip: Starting with vSphere 6.7 scheduling functionality has been added as a native feature in the appliance, eliminating the need for this workflow. It still applies to vSphere 6.5.

When using the vCenter 6 appliance as an Autodeploy server you can also use the appliance as your TFTP-server. But for that to work you need to start that service and enable access to it via a firewall rule.

Of course you also need to enable the Autodeploy service itself, which can be done from the vSphere Web Client under Home - Administration - Deployment - System Configuration - Services. 

After a default installation of vCenter on Windows you automatically have access to vCenter Orchestrator. So when I performed an install it was great that I could start using that tool right away. The only problem I ran into was that the Orchestrator server was not registered as a vCenter Extension, or so it seemed. So I could login with the Orchestrator Client but I could not run workflows from the vSphere Web Client, which is a great feature.