VMware vSphere: Advanced Administration Workshop [V7]

This five-day course provides hands-on training to equip students with a range of skills: from performing routine VMware vSphere® 7 administrative tasks to complex vSphere operations and configurations. Through lab-based activities, students are immersed in real-life situations faced by VMBeans, a fictitious company. These situations expose students to real-life scenarios faced by companies that are building and scaling their virtual infrastructure.

This course uses scenario-based lab exercises and does not provide guided step-by-step instructions. To complete the scenario-based lab exercises, you are required to analyze the task, research, and deduce the required solution. References and suggested documentation are provided.

Approximately 90% of the class is application-focused and taught through labs. The course aligns fully with the VMware Certified Advanced Professional – Data Center Virtualization Deploy exam objectives.

Objectives

By the end of the course, you should be able to meet the following objectives:

• Enable cluster features and configure vSphere storage and networking
• Use host profiles to automate host configurations
• Use Cluster Quickstart to create a VMware vSAN™ enabled cluster
• Configure the VMware vCenter Server® identity provider
• Troubleshoot host connectivity and storage connectivity
• Perform lifecycle operations on vSphere components
• Implement security hardening guidelines to vSphere and virtual machines

Intended Audience

• System administrators
• System engineer

Prerequisites

This course requires the following prerequisites:

• Completion of VMware vSphere: Optimize and Scale [V7] course
• VMware Certified Professional – Data Center Virtualization (VCP-DCV) certification
• System administration experience on Microsoft Windows or Linux operating systems

Product Alignment

• VMware ESXi™ 7
• VMware vCenter Server 7

Course Outline

1 Course Introduction

• Introductions and course logistics
• Course objectives
• Introduction to fictitious company: VMBeans

2 Creating and Configuring Management Clusters

• Enable cluster features that help to improve resource allocation and availability of virtual machines
• Use standard virtual switches to create networking in a cluster
• Recognize when to use VMware vSphere® vMotion®
• Recognize requirements for using iSCSI
• Identify the purpose of iSCSI multipathing
• Select the appropriate vSphere storage types to meet requirements
• Recognize when to configure ESXi NTP support
• Recognize ESXi user account best practices
• Configure ESXi host settings
• Use host profiles appropriately

3 Creating and Configuring Productions Clusters

• Use Cluster Quickstart to create a vSAN enabled cluster
• Configure advanced vSphere HA settings
• Recognize the benefits of Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS)
• Configure the vCenter Server identity provider
• Assign specific permissions and roles to ADFS users
• Recognize how Enhanced vMotion Compatibility benefits VM mobility
• Perform a Cross vCenter Server Migration
• Use content libraries to share virtual machine templates between sites

4 Troubleshooting vSphere and Backing Up Configurations

• Troubleshoot ESXi connectivity issues
• Troubleshoot iSCSI storage issues
• Troubleshoot vSphere cluster resources
• Troubleshoot VMware PowerCLI™ issues
• Back up vCenter Server

5 Lifecycle Management

• Troubleshoot upgrade-blocking issues
• Increase logging levels on vCenter Server
• Configure a VMware Tools™ shared repository
• Upgrade vCenter Server
• Upgrade ESXi
• Upgrade VMware Tools
• Upgrade Virtual Machine Compatibility
• Work with VM placement rules

6 vSphere Security

• Manage advanced virtual machine configurations
• Configure a key management server
• Encrypt virtual machines using vSphere VM encryption
• Secure VMs in transit with encrypted vSphere vMotion
• Identify and implement different ESXi CPU scheduler options
• Apply security hardening guidelines to ESXi hosts
• Replace vCenter Server certificates with trusted CA-signed certificates
• Deploy a new vCenter Server instance
• Reconfigure the primary network identifier for vCenter Server