VMware vSphere: Fast Track [V8].

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 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 8, which includes VMware ESXi™ 8 and VMware vCenter Server® 8.

Objectives.

Target Audience.

Prerequisites.

Course outline.

Module 1: Course Introduction.

• Introductions and course logistics.
• Course objectives.

Module 2: 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.

Module 3: 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.

Module 4: 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.

Module 5: 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.

Module 6: 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.

Module 7: 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.

Module 8: 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.

Module 9: 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.

Module 10: 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.

Module 11: 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.

Module 12: ESXi Operations.

• Use host profiles to manage ESXi configuration compliance.
• Recognize the benefits of using configuration profiles.

Module 13: 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.