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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 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.
Who Should Attend
This course is designed for:
- System Administrators responsible for deploying and maintaining virtual infrastructure
- System Engineers who manage VMware vSphere environments at scale
- IT professionals seeking advanced VMware training in a single, accelerated format
Course Objectives
By the end of this course, you will be able to confidently administer VMware vSphere 8 in enterprise environments.
- Install and configure VMware ESXi hosts and vCenter Server
- Create and manage virtual machines, templates, and content libraries
- Migrate workloads using vSphere vMotion and Storage vMotion
- Configure and maintain clusters with High Availability, DRS, and Fault Tolerance
- Monitor, update, and ensure compliance using vSphere Lifecycle Manager
Course Outline
Course Introduction
- Welcome, introductions, and course logistics
- Review of course objectives
vSphere and ESXi Fundamentals
- Core concepts of virtualization
- Role of vSphere in the software-defined data center and cloud infrastructure
- Interfaces used to access vSphere
- How vSphere interacts with CPUs, memory, networks, storage, and GPUs
- Installation of an ESXi host
vCenter Server Management
- Communication between ESXi hosts and vCenter
- Deploying and configuring the vCenter Server Appliance
- Adjusting vCenter settings and managing license keys
- Creating and organizing vCenter inventory objects
- Applying vCenter permissions and understanding rules
- Viewing vSphere tasks and events
- Setting up vCenter backup schedules
- Importance and operation of vCenter High Availability
vSphere Networking
- Configuring and viewing standard switch setups
- Configuring and viewing distributed switch setups
- Differences between standard and distributed switches
- Applying networking policies on standard and distributed switches
- Configuring and managing vSphere distributed switches
- Using Network I/O Control to improve performance
- Introduction to vSphere Distributed Services Engine and its use cases
vSphere Storage
- Overview of vSphere storage technologies
- Types of vSphere datastores
- Fibre Channel components and addressing
- iSCSI components and addressing, including configuration on ESXi
- Creating and managing VMFS datastores
- Configuring and managing NFS datastores
- Support for NVMe and iSER technologies
- Architecture and requirements for vSAN
- Policy-based storage management
- vSphere Virtual Volumes architecture
- Configuring Storage I/O Control
Deploying Virtual Machines
- Creating and provisioning VMs
- Role and importance of VMware Tools
- Files and components that make up a VM
- Exploring VM settings and options in the vSphere Client
- Dynamically increasing VM resources
- Creating VM templates and deploying from them
- Cloning virtual machines
- Creating customization specifications for guest operating systems
- Creating local, published, and subscribed content libraries
- Deploying VMs from content libraries
- Managing multiple template versions in content libraries
Managing Virtual Machines
- Types of VM migrations within and across vCenter instances
- Using vSphere vMotion and Enhanced vMotion Compatibility
- Migrating VMs with vSphere Storage vMotion
- Creating, managing, and deleting snapshots
- CPU and memory concepts in virtualized environments
- Resource competition among VMs
- Shares, reservations, and limits for CPU and memory
- Role and configuration of a VMware Tools Repository
- Backup and restore options for VMs
vSphere Cluster Management
- Using Cluster Quickstart to enable vSphere cluster services
- Viewing and interpreting cluster information
- How vSphere DRS determines VM placement
- DRS settings and use cases
- Monitoring a DRS cluster
- vSphere HA response to different failures
- Network redundancy options in a HA cluster
- Use cases for HA settings
- Configuring clusters with HA and DRS
- When to use vSphere Fault Tolerance
- Function of vCLS and its impact on operations
Lifecycle and ESXi Operations
- Generating vCenter interoperability reports
- Features of vSphere Lifecycle Manager
- ESXi images and image depots
- Enabling Lifecycle Manager in a cluster
- Validating host compliance and remediation with Lifecycle Manager
- Automatic recommendations in Lifecycle Manager
- Upgrading VMware Tools and VM hardware with Lifecycle Manager
- Managing ESXi configuration compliance with host profiles
- Benefits of using configuration profiles
vSphere Monitoring and Optimization
- Key factors that impact VM performance
- Factors that influence vCenter performance
- Using vCenter tools to monitor resource consumption
- Creating and managing custom alarms in vCenter
- Benefits and capabilities of VMware Skyline
- Use cases for Skyline Advisor Pro