VMware vSphere: Fast Track [V7]

This five-day, intensive course takes you from introductory to advanced VMware vSphere® 7 management skills. Building on the installation and configuration content from our best-selling course, you will also develop advanced skills needed to manage and maintain a highly available and scalable virtual infrastructure. Through a mix of lecture and hands-on labs, you will install, configure and manage vSphere 7. You will explore the features that build a foundation for a truly scalable infrastructure and discuss when and where these features have the greatest effect. This course prepares you to administer a vSphere infrastructure for an organization of any size using vSphere 7, which includes VMware ESXi™ 7 and VMware vCenter Server® 7.

Objectives

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

• Describe the software-defined data center (SDDC)
• Explain the vSphere components and their function in the infrastructure
• Describe the benefits and capabilities of VMware Skyline
• Install and configure VMware ESXi™ hosts
• Deploy and configure VMware vCenter® Server Appliance™
• Use VMware vSphere® Client™ to manage the vCenter Server inventory and the vCenter Server configuration
• Manage, monitor, back up, and protect vCenter Server Appliance
• Create virtual networks with vSphere standard switches
• Describe the storage technologies supported by vSphere
• Configure virtual storage using iSCSI and NFS storage
• Create and manage VMware vSphere® VMFS datastores
• Use the vSphere Client to create virtual machines, templates, clones, and snapshots
• Create a content library and deploy virtual machines from templates in the library
• Manage virtual machine resource use and manage resource pools
• Migrate virtual machines with VMware vSphere® vMotion® and VMware vSphere® Storage vMotion®
• Create and manage a vSphere cluster that is enabled with VMware vSphere® High Availability and VMware vSphere® Distributed Resource Scheduler™
• Create virtual networks with VMware vSphere® Distributed Switch™ and enable distributed switch features
• Discuss solutions for managing the vSphere life cycle
• Use VMware vSphere® Lifecycle Manager™ to perform upgrades to ESXi hosts and virtual machines
• Use host profiles to manage ESXi configuration compliance
• Describe how vSphere storage APIs help storage systems integrate with vSphere
• Configure and use virtual machine storage policies

Certifications

Attendance of this course meets the training requirement to achieve the following certification:

• VMware Certified Professional – Data Center Virtualization (VCP-DCV)

Intended Audience

• System administrators
• System engineers

Prerequisites

This course has the following prerequisites:

• System administration experience on Microsoft Windows or Linux operating systems

Product Alignment

• ESXi 7
• vCenter Server 7

Course Outline

1 Course Introduction

• Introductions and course logistics
• Course objectives

2 Introduction to vSphere and the Software-Defined Data Center

• Explain basic virtualization concepts
• Describe how vSphere fits into the software-defined data center and the cloud infrastructure
• Explain how vSphere interacts with CPUs, memory, networks, and storage
• Recognize the user interfaces for accessing the vCenter Server system and ESXi hosts
• Describe the ESXi host architecture
• Navigate the Direct Console User Interface (DCUI) to configure an ESXi host
• Recognize ESXi host user account best practices
• Install an ESXi host
• Use VMware Host Client™ to configure ESXi host settings
• Describe how to proactively manage your vSphere environment using VMware Skyline

3 Virtual Machines

• Create and provision a virtual machine
• Explain the importance of VMware Tools™
• Install VMware Tools
• Identify the files that make up a VM
• Recognize the components of a VM
• Recognize virtual devices supported by a VM
• Describe the benefits and use cases for containers
• Identify the parts of a container system

4 vCenter Server

• Describe the vCenter Server architecture
• Discuss how ESXi hosts communicate with vCenter Server
• Deploy and configure vCenter Server Appliance
• Use the vSphere Client to manage the vCenter Server inventory
• Add data center, organizational objects, and hosts to vCenter Server
• Use roles and permissions to enable users to access objects in the vCenter Server inventory
• Back up vCenter Server Appliance
• Monitor vCenter Server tasks, events, and appliance health
• Use vCenter Server High Availability to protect a vCenter Server Appliance

5 Configuring and Managing Virtual Networks

• Create and manage standard switches
• Describe the virtual switch connection types
• Configure virtual switch security, traffic-shaping and load-balancing policies
• Compare vSphere distributed switches and standard switches

6 Configuring and Managing Virtual Storage

• Identify storage protocols and storage device types
• Discuss ESXi hosts using iSCSI, NFS, and Fibre Channel storage
• Create and manage VMFS and NFS datastores
• Explain how multipathing works with iSCSI, NFS, and Fibre Channel storage
• Recognize the components of a VMware vSAN™ configuration

7 Virtual Machine Management

• Use templates and cloning to deploy new virtual machines
• Modify and manage virtual machines
• Create a content library and deploy virtual machines from templates in the library
• Use customization specification files to customize a new virtual machine
• Perform vSphere vMotion and vSphere Storage vMotion migrations
• Describe Enhanced vMotion Compatibility
• Create and manage virtual machine snapshots
• Examine the features and functions of VMware vSphere® Replication™
• Describe the benefits of vSphere Storage APIs – Data Protection

8 Resource Management and Monitoring

• Discuss CPU and memory concepts in a virtualized environment
• Describe what overcommitment of a resource means
• Describe methods for optimizing CPU and memory usage
• Use various tools to monitor resource use
• Create and use alarms to report certain conditions or events

9 vSphere Clusters

• Describe the functions of a vSphere DRS cluster
• Create a vSphere DRS cluster
• Monitor a vSphere cluster configuration
• Describe options for making a vSphere environment highly available
• Explain the vSphere HA architecture
• Configure and manage a vSphere HA cluster
• Examine the features and functions of VMware vSphere® Fault Tolerance
• Describe the function of the vSphere® Cluster Service

10 Network Scalability

• Configure and manage vSphere distributed switches
• Describe how VMware vSphere® Network I/O Control enhances performance
• Explain distributed switch features such as port mirroring and NetFlow

11 vSphere Lifecycle Management

• Recognize the importance of vCenter Server Update Planner
• Describe how VMware vSphere® Lifecycle Manager™ works
• Describe how to update ESXi hosts using baselines
• Validate ESXi host compliance using a cluster image
• Describe how to upgrade VMware Tools and VM hardware
• Describe VMware vSphere® Lifecycle Manager™ and VMware vSAN™ integration

12 Host and Management Scalability

• Use host profiles to manage ESXi configuration compliance
• Create and manage resource pools in a cluster
• Describe how scalable shares work

13 Storage Scalability

• Explain why VMware vSphere® VMFS is a high-performance, scalable file system
• Explain VMware vSphere® Storage APIs - Array Integration, VMware vSphere® API for Storage Awareness™, and vSphere APIs for I/O Filtering
• Configure and assign virtual machine storage policies
• Create VMware vSAN™ storage policies
• Recognize components of the vSphere Virtual Volumes architecture
• Configure VMware vSphere® Storage DRS™ and VMware vSphere® Storage I/O Control