Select Menu > Policies and Profiles, and under Policies and Profiles, click VM Customization Specifications.
Click the Create a new specification icon.
The New VM Guest Customization Specification wizard opens.
On the Name and target OS page, enter a name and description for the customization specification and select Windows as a target guest OS.
(Optional) Select the Generate a new security identity (SID) option and click Next.
A Windows Security ID (SID) is used in some Windows operating systems to uniquely identify systems and users. If you do not select this option, the new virtual machine has the same SID as the virtual machine or template from which it was cloned or deployed.
Duplicate SIDs do not cause problems when the computers are part of a domain and only domain user accounts are used. However, if the computers are part of a Workgroup or local user accounts are used, duplicate SIDs can compromise file access controls. For more information, see the documentation for your Microsoft Windows operating system.
On the Set Registration Information page, enter the virtual machine owner’s name and organization and click Next.
On the Computer name page, enter a computer name for the guest operating system and a domain name.
The operating system uses the computer name to identify itself on the network. On Linux systems, it is called the host name.
Option
Action
Use the virtual machine name
Select this option to use the virtual machine name. The computer name that vCenter Server creates is identical to the name of the virtual machine on which the guest operating system is running. If the name exceeds 63 characters, it is truncated.
Enter a name in the Clone/Deploy wizard
Select this option to be prompted to enter a name during cloning or deployment.
Enter a name
Enter a name.
The name can contain alphanumeric characters and a hyphen (-). It cannot contain a period (.), blank spaces, or special characters, and cannot contain digits only. Names are not case-sensitive.
(Optional) To ensure that the name is unique, select the Append a numeric value check box.
This action appends a hyphen followed by a numeric value to the virtual machine name. The name is truncated if it exceeds 63 characters when combined with the numeric value.
Generate a name using the custom application configured with vCenter Server Optional: Enter a parameter that can be passed to the custom application.
On the Windows license page, provide licensing information for the Windows operating system and click Next.
Option
Action
For nonserver operating systems
Type the Windows product key for the new guest operating system.
For server operating systems
Type the Windows product key for the new guest operating system.
Select Include Server License Information.
Select either Per seat or Per server.
If you select Per server, enter the maximum number of simultaneous connections for the server to accept.
On the Set Administrator Password page, configure the administrator password for the virtual machine and click Next.
Enter a password for the administrator account and confirm the password by typing it again.
(Optional) Select the Automatically logon as Administrator check box to log users in to the guest operating system as Administrator, and select the number of times to log in automatically.
On the Time zone page, select the time zone for the virtual machine and click Next.
(Optional) On the Run Once page, specify commands to run the first time a user logs in to the guest operating system and click Next.
See the Microsoft Sysprep documentation for information about RunOnce commands.
On the Network page, select the type of network settings to apply to the guest operating system and click Next.
Select Use standard network settings so that vCenter Server configures all network interfaces from a DHCP server by using the default settings.
Select Manually select custom settings and configure each network interface yourself.
Select a network adapter from the list or add a new one.
For the selected NIC, click the vertical ellipsis icon and select Edit.
The Edit Network dialog box opens.
Click the IPv4 tab to configure the virtual machine to use IPv4 network.
You can configure all the settings at that stage or you can select the Prompt the user for an IPv4 address when the specification is used option. In that case, vCenter Server prompts for an IP address when you select to apply that customization specification during cloning or deployment. With that option, you can also configure the gateways during cloning or deployment.
Click the IPv6 tab to configure the virtual machine to use IPv6 network.
You can configure all the settings at that stage or you can select the Prompt the user for an address when the specification is used option. In that case, vCenter Server prompts for an IP address when you select to apply that customization specification during cloning or deployment. With that option, you can also configure the gateways during cloning or deployment.
Click the DNS tab to specify DNS server details.
Click WINS to specify primary and secondary WINS server information.
Click OK to close the Edit Network dialog box.
On the Set Workgroup or Domain page, select how the virtual machine participates in the network and click Next.
Option
Action
Workgroup
Enter a workgroup name. For example, MSHOME.
Windows Server Domain
Enter the domain name.
To add a computer to the specified domain, enter the user name and password for a user account that has permission.
On the Ready to complete page, review the details and click Finish to save your changes.

Prerequisites
You must have an FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, or SCP server up and running with sufficient disk space to store the backup.
Dedicate a separate folder on your server for each file-based backup.
Procedure
In a Web browser, go to the vCenter Server Appliance Management Interface, https://appliance-IP-address-or-FQDN:5480.
Log in as root.
In the vCenter Server Appliance Management Interface, click Summary.
Click Backup.
The Backup Appliance wizard opens.
Enter the backup protocol and location details.
Option
Description
Backup protocol
Select the protocol to use to connect to your backup server. You can select FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, or SCP.
For FTP, FTPS, HTTP, or HTTPS the path is relative to the home directory configured for the service. For SCP, the path is absolute to the remote systems root directory.
Backup location
Enter the server address and backup folder in which to store the backup files.
Port
Enter the default or custom port of the backup server.
User name
Enter a user name of a user with write privileges on the backup server.
Password
Enter the password of the user with write privileges on the backup server.
(Optional) Select Encrypt Backup Data to encrypt your backup file and enter a password for the encryption.
If you select to encrypt the backup data, you must use the encryption password for the restore procedure.
Click Next.
On the Select parts to backup page, review the data that is backed up by default.
(Optional) Select Stats, Events, and Tasks to back up additional historical data from the database.
(Optional) In the Description text box, enter a description of the backup and click Next.
On the Ready to complete page, review the summary information for the backup and click Finish.
The Backup Progress window opens and indicates the progress of the backup operation.
After the backup process finishes, click OK to close the Backup Progress window.
Results
You successfully created a backup file of the vCenter Server Appliance.

Storage I/O Control v2
Storage I/O Control (SIOC) was initially introduced in vSphere 4.1 to provide I/O prioritization of virtual machines running on a cluster of ESXi hosts that had access to shared storage. It extended the familiar constructs of shares and limits, which existed for CPU and memory, to address storage utilization through a dynamic allocation of I/O queue slots across a cluster of ESXi servers. The purpose of SIOC is to address the ‘noisy neighbor’ problem, i.e. a low priority virtual machine impacting other higher priority virtual machines due to the nature of the application and its I/O running in that low priority VM.
vSphere 5.0 extended SIOC to provide cluster-wide I/O shares and limits for NFS datastores. This means that no single virtual machine should be able to create a bottleneck in any environment regardless of the type of shared storage used. SIOC automatically throttles a virtual machine which is consuming a disparate amount of I/O bandwidth when the configured latency threshold has been exceeded. To allow other virtual machines receive their fair share of I/O bandwidth on the same datastore, a share based fairness mechanism has been created which now is supported on both NFS and VMFS.
vSphere 5.1 introduced a new SIOC feature called Stats Only Mode. When enabled, it doesn’t enforce throttling but gathers statistics to assist Storage DRS. Storage DRS now has statistics in advance for new datastores being added to the datastore cluster & can get up to speed on the datastores profile/capabilities much quicker than before.
Another 5.1 feature was Automatic Threshold Computation. The default latency threshold for SIOC is 30ms. Not all storage devices are created equal so this default was chosen as a sort of “catch-all”. There are certain devices which will hit their natural contention point much earlier than others, for example All Flash Arrays, in which case the threshold should be lowered by the user. However, manually determining the correct latency can be difficult for users. This gave rise to the need for the latency threshold to get automatically determined at a correct level for each device. Using the I/O injector modeling of SIOC, peak throughput and corresponding latency of a datastore is measured. The latency threshold value at which Storage I/O Control will kick in is then set to 90% of this peak value (by default). vSphere administrators can change this 90% to another percentage value or they can still input a millisecond value if they so wish.
The default latency threshold for SIOC can be reduced to as low as 5ms.
SIOC V1 Overview
SIOC V1 is disabled by default. It needs to be enabled on a per datastore level, and it is only utilized when a specific level of latency has been reached. By default, the latency threshold for a datastore is set to 30ms, as mentioned earlier. If SIOC is triggered, disk shares (aggregated from all VMDKs using the datastore) are used to assign I/O queue slots on a per host basis to that datastore. In other words, SIOC limits the number of IOs that a host can issue. The more VMs/VMDKs that run on a particular host, the higher the number of shares, and thus the higher the number of IOs that that particular host can issue. The throttling is done by modifying the device queue depth of the various hosts sharing the datastore. When the period of contention passes, and latency returns to normal values, the device queue depths are allowed to return to default values on each host.
SIOC V2 Introduction
Before describing SIOC V2, it should be highlighted that SIOC V1 and SIOC V2 can co-exist on vSphere 6.5. This makes it much simpler when considering upgrades, or migrations between versions. With that in mind, SIOC V2 is considerably different from a user experience perspective when compared to V1. SIOCv2 is implemented using IO Filter framework Storage IO Control category. SIOC V2 can be managed using SPBM Policies. What this means is that you create a policy which contains your SIOC specifications, and these policies are then attached to virtual machines.
Creating an SIOC policy based
Creating an SIOC policy is done is exactly the same way as building a storage policy for VSAN or Virtual Volumes. Select the VM Storage Policy from the vSphere client home page, and from there select the option to create a new VM Storage Policy. VM Storage Policies in vSphere 6.5 has a new option called “Common Rules”. These are used for configuring data services provided by hosts, such as Storage I/O Control and Encryption.
Use common rules in the VM storage policy
The first step is to click on the check box to enabled common rules. This will then allow you to add components, such as SIOC, to the policy.

Add Component – Storage I/O Control
In vSphere 6.5, there are two components available for common rules, Encryption and Storage I/O Control. Select Storage I/O Control in this case. Now you can select Normal, High, Low or Custom shares allocation.

This table describes the different Limits,Shares and Reservations associated with each setting:
HIGH
NORMAL
LOW
Limits
100,000
10,000
1,000
Reservation
100
50
10
Shares
2,000
1,000
500
When the policy has been created, it may be assigned to newly deployed VMs during provisioning,or to already existing VMs by assigning this new policy to the whole VM (or just an individual VMDK) by editing its settings. One thing to note is that IO Filter based IOPS does not look at the size of the IO. For example, there is no normalization so that a 64K IOP is not equal to 2 x 32K IOPS. It is a fixed value of IOPS irrespective of the size of the IO.
Custom Allocation
If neither of the values in the Normal, High, Low allocations is appropriate, there is the ability to create custom settings for these values. In a custom setting, IOPS limit and IOPS reservation are both set to -1, implying unlimited. These may be modified as required.

Advanced Options
SchedCostUnit
This is an advanced parameter that was created for SIOC V1 only. SIOC V2 does not have SchedCostUnit implemented. For V1, SchedCostUnit determines the unit size (normalized size) of an IO operation for scheduling, and it is currently a constant value of 32K. This constant value, however, may not satisfy different requirements from different customers. Some customers may want to set this unit size to 4K. Other customers may want to set it up to 256K.
To satisfy these different requirements, SchedCostUnit is now configurable. It defaults to an IO size value of 32K, and allowable values range between 4K to 256K.
The SchedCostUnit dictates how requests are counted. A request with size <= SchedCostUnit counts as a single I/O. Anything greater than SchedCostUnit will be counted as 2 or more requests.
For example, by changing the SchedCostUnit from 32K to 64K, the number of IOPS observed will halve. The size of the IO can be set using the:
“esxcli system settings advanced set -o /Disk/SchedCostUnit -i 65536”
and verified by using the”
“esxcli system settings advanced list -o /Disk/SchedCostUnit”
command. SIOC V2 counts guest IO directly. IOPS will be counted based on IO count, regardless of the IO size.
SchedReservationBurst
When limits are set on VMDKs, requests could have high average latency because the limit was enforced at a high (per request) granularity. This was due to the strict enforcement on a VM getting its share of IOs in interval of 1 second/L, where L is the user specified limit. The issue is more visible in fast storage, such as flash arrays. It was noted that SIOC V2 did not perform well when presented with a “bursty” workload on fast storage.
This SchedReservationBurst setting relaxes that constraint so a VM get its share of IOs at any time during a 1 second window, rather than enforce strict placement of IOs in intervals of 1/L. BURST option is turned-on by default.
SIOC V2 Limitations
In this initial release of SIOC V2 in vSphere 6.5, there is no support for vSAN or Virtual Volumes. SIOC v2 is only supported with VMs that run on VMFS and NFS datastores.