VMware vSphere: Fast Track

VMware vSphere: Fast Track Course Overview

This five-day, extended hour course takes you from introductory to advanced VMware vSphere® 8 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 8. 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 8, which includes VMware ESXi™ 8 and VMware vCenter Server® 8.

• Product Alignment

• VMware ESXi 8.0

• VMware vCenter 8.0

Skills Gained

After completing this course you should be able to:

• • Install and configure ESXi hosts

• • Deploy and configure vCenter

• • Use the vSphere Client to create the vCenter inventory and assign roles to vCenter users

• • Configure vCenter High Availability

• • Create and configure virtual networks using vSphere standard switches and distributed switches

• • Create and configure datastores using storage technologies supported by vSphere

• • Use the vSphere Client to create virtual machines, templates, clones, and snapshots

• • Configure and manage a VMware Tools Repository

• • Create content libraries for managing templates and deploying virtual machines

• • Manage virtual machine resource use

• • Migrate virtual machines with vSphere vMotion and vSphere Storage vMotion

• • Create and configure a vSphere cluster that is enabled with vSphere High Availability and vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler

• • Manage the life cycle of vSphere to keep vCenter, ESXi hosts, and virtual machines up to date

• • Configure and manage vSphere networking and storage for a large and sophisticated enterprise

• • Use host profiles to manage VMware ESXi host compliance

• • Monitor the vCenter, ESXi, and VMs performance in the vSphere client

Who will the Course Benefit?

System engineers and administrators involved in the deployment and administration of a vSphere environment

Requirements

Attendees should meet the following prerequisites:

• • System administration experience on Microsoft Windows or Linux operating systems

NOTE: Course technical content is subject to change without notice.

---

Course Contents

Course Introduction



• Introductions and course logistics

• Course objectives

vSphere and Virtualization Overview



• Explain basic virtualization concepts

• Describe how vSphere fits in the software-defined data center and the cloud infrastructure

• Recognize the user interfaces for accessing vSphere

• Explain how vSphere interacts with CPUs, memory, networks, storage, and GPUs

• Install an ESXi host

vCenter Management



• Recognize ESXi hosts communication with vCenter

• Deploy vCenter Server Appliance

• Configure vCenter settings

• Use the vSphere Client to add and manage license keys

• Create and organize vCenter inventory objects

• Recognize the rules for applying vCenter permissions

• View vSphere tasks and events

• Create a vCenter backup schedule

• Recognize the importance of vCenter High Availability

• Explain how vCenter High Availability works

Configure and Manage vSphere Networking



• Configure and view standard switch configurations

• Configure and view distributed switch configurations

• Recognize the difference between standard switches and distributed switches

• Explain how to set networking policies on standard and distributed switches

Configure and Manage vSphere Storage



• Recognize vSphere storage technologies

• Identify types of vSphere datastores

• Describe Fibre Channel components and addressing

• Describe iSCSI components and addressing

• Configure iSCSI storage on ESXi

• Create and manage VMFS datastores

• Configure and manage NFS datastores

• Discuss vSphere support for NVMe and iSER technologies

Deploying Virtual Machines



• Create and provision VMs

• Explain the importance of VMware Tools

• Identify the files that make up a VM

• Recognize the components of a VM

• Navigate the vSphere Client and examine VM settings and options

• Modify VMs by dynamically increasing resources

• Create VM templates and deploy VMs from them

• Clone VMs

• Create customization specifications for guest operating systems

• Create local, published, and subscribed content libraries

• Deploy VMs from content libraries

• Manage multiple versions of VM templates in content libraries

Managing Virtual Machines



• Recognize the types of VM migrations that you can perform within a vCenter instance and across vCenter instances

• Migrate VMs using vSphere vMotion

• Describe the role of Enhanced vMotion Compatibility in migrations

• Migrate VMs using vSphere Storage vMotion

• Take a snapshot of a VM

• Manage, consolidate, and delete snapshots

• Describe CPU and memory concepts in relation to a virtualized environment

• Describe how VMs compete for resources

• Define CPU and memory shares, reservations, and limits

• Recognize the role of a VMware Tools Repository

• Configure a VMware Tools Repository

• Recognize the backup and restore solution for VMs

vSphere Cluster Management



• Use Cluster Quickstart to enable vSphere cluster services and configure the cluster

• View information about a vSphere cluster

• Explain how vSphere DRS determines VM placement on hosts in the cluster

• Recognize use cases for vSphere DRS settings

• Monitor a vSphere DRS cluster

• Describe how vSphere HA responds to different types of failures

• Identify options for configuring network redundancy in a vSphere HA cluster

• Recognize the use cases for various vSphere HA settings

• Configure a cluster enabled for vSphere DRS and vSphere HA

• Recognize when to use vSphere Fault Tolerance

• Describe the function of the vCLS

• Recognize operations that might disrupt the healthy functioning of vCLS VMs

Managing the vSphere Lifecycle



• Generate vCenter interoperability reports

• Recognize features of vSphere Lifecycle Manager

• Describe ESXi images and image depots

• Enable vSphere Lifecycle Manager in a vSphere cluster

• Validate ESXi host compliance against a cluster image and remediate ESXi hosts using vSphere Lifecycle Manager

• Describe vSphere Lifecycle Manager automatic recommendations

• Use vSphere Lifecycle Manager to upgrade VMware Tools and VM hardware

Network Operations



• Configure and manage vSphere distributed switches

• Describe how VMware vSphere Network I/O Control enhances performance

• Define vSphere Distributed Services Engine

• Describe the use cases and benefits of vSphere Distributed Services Engine

Storage Operations



• Describe the architecture and requirements of vSAN configuration

• Describe storage policy-based management

• Recognize components in the vSphere Virtual Volumes architecture

• Configure Storage I/O Control

ESXi Operations



• Use host profiles to manage ESXi configuration compliance

• Recognize the benefits of using configuration profiles

vSphere Monitoring



• Monitor the key factors that can affect a virtual machine's performance

• Describe the factors that influence vCenter performance

• Use vCenter tools to monitor resource use

• Create custom alarms in vCenter

• Describe the benefits and capabilities of VMware Skyline

• Recognize uses for Skyline Advisor Pro