VMware VCA 1V0-701 – VMware Certified Associate 6 (Retired) Part 5

26. Demo: Roles

In this video, I’ll demonstrate how to create roles in the Vs fair Web client. So here I’m at the home screen of the Vsfair web client and I can click on roles. And under roles, you can see there are going to be certain roles that are pre built, predefined roles that are automatically included. So, for example, we’ve got the administrator role.

And what a role is, is simply a set of privileges. It’s a list of things that you can do. Like, for example, can you allocate space or browse data stores? Can you create data store clusters? Can you put a host in maintenance mode or carry out local operations on a host or reconfigure a host? It’s just a list of things that you either can or cannot do. That’s all that a role is.

And by default, we’ve got the administrator role that you can see everything here is checked. The administrator role can do everything. We’ve also got the read only role and the no access role, which are pretty self explanatory. And then there are a series of sample roles. So for example, we’ve got the network administrator sample role.

This is designed for somebody who wants to be able to assign networks to virtual machines or a virtual machine power user sample role who can do things like browse data stores and cancel tasks and things like that. And if I want to, I can deploy a new role based on these sample roles by simply cloning the existing sample role. And at that point, I can even modify it right. I can add some other permissions to it if I want to do so.

And I can create my own new custom role. I’m going to call this Rick Grishy custom role. And so now I can go ahead and create my own special custom roles with my own specific sets of privileges that I want to grant to that role. And this is essentially how we control who can do what in the Vsphere web client. And then we can go into our inventory here. So at the hosts and clusters level, I can go to like a cluster or a host or an individual virtual machine.

And under there I can go to manage and permissions, and I can define which users get which role on this particular object. So for example, if I go into my demo cluster and I go to manage and I go to permissions and let’s create a new permission, right, I’m going to give somebody that Rick Crete custom role that I’ve just created. Let’s give it to I’m just going to pick a random user here. I’m going to say users is going to get that role. So that’s my user and group, they’re going to get the Rick Crete custom role on the demo cluster. And it’s going to propagate to children, meaning that once I grant users this role on the demo cluster, it will propagate down to child objects like this ESXi host right here.

And here you can see that same user and group that Rick Creechy custom role and you can see where this permission was defined. So roles are a great way to control who can actually do what inside of the Vsphere web client. And it can be integrated with Active Directory users and groups so that you can easily manage all of your permissions by simply adding and removing people from Active Directory security groups.

27. Demo: Tags

In this video I’ll demonstrate how to use tags. And this is going to be a really short demo because this is a really simple concept. So I’m going to browse to my hosts and Clusters view. And here you can see I’ve got a virtual machine called Rick Krishi Demo. Now let’s go ahead and right click this virtual machine. And what I’m going to do is actually I’m going to rename this VM just to give it a more descriptive name. So instead of Rick Krishi demo, I’m going to call it Rick Kreesh Database or DB. So this is a database virtual machine. I’ll just refresh my web client. This is a database VM. And so I have a group of database administrators, let’s say, that I want to allow to very quickly and easily come in to the Visa web client and find all of the database servers. What I can do is I can go to virtual machines and I can apply a tag and I’m going to call my tag Database. And now I can pick a category.

I can create a new category. I’m going to create a new category. My category name is going to be Data. I call it DB virtual machines. And I’m going to associate this tag type with Virtual machines. I’ll go ahead and hit OK. And now I’ve tagged this particular VM as a database virtual machine. And if I go to my Venter inventory and I go to related objects, I can now very quickly and easily browse through these virtual machines by the tags that are associated with them. And that’s really the only purpose of these tags. Now you can use them for some other higher level automation stuff as you start to dig deeper into the Vsphere feature set. But for the purposes of the VMware associate exam, that’s really all you need to know is that you can create tags and tag certain objects to allow you to quickly organize and find what you’re looking for in the Vsphere webcam.

28. Demo: VMware Tools

In this video, I’ll take a moment to explain VMware Tools and why it’s so important and some of the reasons why you want to make sure that it’s running on every virtual machine that you can possibly run it on. Now, before we get into some of the specific features that VMware Tools provides, let’s take a quick look at how you can install VMware Tools on your virtual machines. So there’s a couple of ways that you can go about this, and there’s also a couple of ways that you can ensure that VMware Tools is kept consistently updated. My personal favorite way to do this is to just allow VMware Tools to automatically update every time you reboot a virtual machine.

So, for example, here we see a virtual machine called Rick Creech DB. If I want to, I can right click this virtual machine. And there’s a number of options here. I’m going to go to Edit Settings and under Edit Settings, what I can do is I can choose to allow VMware Tools to automatically update upon reboot. The reason that I like to do this is because many VMware Tools upgrades actually require a reboot. And so if I just check this option now, I know that in the future, whenever this virtual machine gets rebooted, it’s going to update at that time, and I’m not going to have to do an extra reboot just to get VMware Tools installed on this particular VM.

So that’s really one of the easiest ways to make sure that VMware Tools is up to date on your virtual machines by allowing it to automatically upgrade every time the virtual machine is powered up. And the way that VMware Tools works is it actually mounts as an ISO image. So when you boot up your virtual machine, it will mount an ISO image to this virtual machine CD DVD drive. And that’s how the VMware Tools installation will actually take place. Now, why do we care if VMware Tools is installed on your virtual machine? Well, there’s a couple of really important reasons. So for this virtual machine, if I go to the summary screen, I have the ability to open a console to this VM. Now, at the moment, it’s powered off, but if I want to, I could open a console to this virtual machine.

And you can see right here, VMware Tools is not running and is not installed. My console isn’t going to work as nicely as it would if I had VMware Tools installed. The mouse is going to be a little flaky. It’s not going to work as smoothly as it would if I had VMware Tools installed. That’s one of the more glaring requirements for VMware Tools. But it’s probably not one of the most important. VMware tools includes certain drivers. So for this VM, for example, if I go to edit settings for this VM, I’ve chosen a certain type of virtual network interface card. I’ve chosen the VMX net three virtual network interface card type and that requires VMware Tools.

VMware Tools has the drivers for the VMX net three virtual nick bundled in. So that’s one really important reason that I need VMware Tools. The other really important reason is for memory. VMware Tools includes the balloon driver for memory. And what that means is if my ESXi host that this VM is running on starts to run out of memory, it has a mechanism called ballooning that it can use to actually reclaim memory that is no longer being used by the virtual machines running on that host. So if my host starts to run out of memory, I’m going to have a really problematic situation here because I don’t have VMware Tools installed on my virtual machines.

The host cannot get memory back from those VMs. So it’s definitely a performance best practice to have VMware Tools installed on all your VMs. And one final note. VMware Tools also gives us the ability to perform a soft shutdown and a soft restart of the guest operating system. So I can always reset or power off my virtual machines if I want to, but that’s essentially the equivalent of pulling the power cord if I want to do a soft Windows shutdown or a Windows restart. Need VMware Tools installed on my virtual machine to be able to push those operations out. From the Vsphere web client.

29. Demo: Power States

In this video, we’ll take a look at the different power states that a virtual machine can be in. And this is really a very brief lecture for our virtual machines. You can see his particular VM is currently in the powered off state. That’s just a virtual machine that’s powered off. Pretty self explanatory. If I right click this virtual machine, we can see here number one, we can power it on. So I’m going to go ahead and power my virtual machine on, and we can also perform a soft shutdown, a soft reboot. If we’ve got VMware tools installed on the virtual machine, we have that capability to perform power operations in a way that’s friendly to the guest operating system.

So these are all pretty straightforward virtual machine power states that you’re probably pretty comfortable with. Now, as my virtual machine boots up here, we can see it’s raising an alert saying VMware tools is not installed. I can right click this VM and under power, I can either power it off, suspend it, or reset it. I want to focus on the ability to suspend the virtual machine right now, so I’m going to go ahead and suspend the selected virtual machine. What suspend is actually going to do is it’s going to power off the VM and it’s going to capture the current contents of memory in a file, and it stores in disk.

So if you’ve ever taken your laptop and just shut it, that’s essentially suspending your laptop, right? When you open your laptop back up, it’s still going to have whatever you had open, still going to be open. The contents of memory are preserved, but you’re not consuming power like you would if the laptop was powered on. That’s the same thing as suspending a virtual machine. You’re essentially powering the VM off, but you’re saving the contents of memory to a file.

Now, you can see here, when I tried to suspend my virtual machine, I have insufficient disk space on my data store, so it can’t actually store the contents of memory. So in this scenario, my virtual machine actually can’t be suspended because I can’t capture the contents of memory at this given moment. So that’s all a suspended virtual machine means, is the virtual machine that’s powered off. But we’ve actually captured the contents of memory so that when we bring the virtual machine back on, it’s going to be in the exact state it was before with any programs that were running at the time when we suspended.