Course Introduction

• Introductions and course logistics
• Course objectives

Creating and Configuring Management Clusters

• Create a vSphere cluster for management workloads
• Activate vSphere cluster features that help to improve resource allocation and availability of virtual machines
• Use standard virtual switches to create networking in a cluster
• Select the appropriate vSphere storage types to meet requirements
• Configure iSCSI storage
• Configure VMFS and NFS datastores
• Recognize when to configure ESXi NTP and PTP support
• Recognize ESXi user account best practices
• Configure ESXi host settings
• Use vSphere configuration profiles to maintain consistent ESXi host configurations

Creating and Configuring Production Clusters

• Use Cluster Quickstart to create a vSAN-activated cluster
• Configure advanced vSphere HA settings
• Configure the vCenter identity provider
• Assign specific permissions and roles to Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) users
• Configure Enhanced vMotion Compatibility on a cluster and a VM
• Perform a Cross vCenter Server migration
• Use content libraries to share virtual machine templates between sites
• Manage VM and ESXi host resources using resource pools, scalable shares, and vSphere DRS rules

Troubleshooting vSphere and Backing Up Configurations

• Troubleshoot ESXi connectivity issues
• Troubleshoot ESXi storage issues
• Troubleshoot vSphere cluster issues
• Troubleshoot PowerCLI issues
• Generate vCenter and ESXi log bundles
• Back up vCenter
• Create a vCenter profile to standardize configurations in the environment

Lifecycle Management

• Troubleshoot upgrade-blocking issues
• Increase logging levels on vCenter
• Configure a VMware Tools™ shared repository
• Upgrade vCenter
• Upgrade ESXi
• Upgrade VMware Tools
• Upgrade virtual machine hardware compatibility

vSphere Security

• 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 certificates with trusted CA-signed certificates
• Reconfigure the primary network identifier for a vCenter instance