The vSphere Client is used to connect to and manage either ESXi servers individually, or more often to connect to a vCenter server to manage multiple ESXi servers in a single interface (or "pane of glass").

Its a simple but important part of a vSphere deployment, as without it you cannot manage your environment. Ok so you could if you know the vSphere CLI or PowerCLI, but my point is its the main management interface for ESXi and vCenter that you will use day-to-day.

Its extremley easy to install, just a simple next, next, blah and finish.

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I've been working with VMware View for a number of years, designing, implementing, fixing and upgrading it's various different versions released along the way.

VDI is an area of virtualisation I have grown to really enjoy. It represents more of a challenge than your normal server/DR virtualisation project can offer because there are so many more considerations. Not only that but the end result of your design and implementation is judged by the end users using this environment on a daily basis, if they're not happy, you will soon know about it.

So as a consultant travelling around and seeing various different companies and designing View environments based on more often than not quite lacking information about how they work, the most important take away I have had is ensuring the View environment itself and the infrastructure is configure correctly as a starting point. I will cover other aspects such as users and specific configurations in future posts, here I want to cover the core infrastructure best practices.

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For HA, DRS, vMotion and Storage vMotion to work you need to use shared storage, in this case an iSCSI SAN.

I will show you how to configure ESX to connect to and use iSCSI SAN storage with CHAP authentication.

See Configuring iSCSI Storage (Basic) if your not using CHAP.

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