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Course Overview
What’s the fastest way to go from beginner to advanced vSphere administrator? The VMware vSphere: Fast Track [V8] course combines foundational training with advanced administration skills in a single, immersive five-day program.
Through extended hours of instructor-led training and intensive labs, you’ll learn to install, configure, and manage vSphere 8—covering VMware ESXi™ 8 and VMware vCenter Server® 8. You’ll gain the ability to build, scale, and maintain a highly available virtual infrastructure, explore networking and storage strategies, and practice life cycle management.
This accelerated course is designed for IT professionals who want to quickly advance from setup and deployment into complex operations, ensuring they can support enterprise-level virtual environments.
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