This intensive course takes you from introductory to advanced VMware vSphere® 7 management skills. Building on the installation and configuration content from our best-selling course, you 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 install, configure and manage vSphere 7. 

You 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 7, which includes VMware ESXi™ 7 and VMware vCenter Server® 7.

Audience

• System administrators
• System engineers

Prerequisites

• System administration experience on Microsoft Windows or Linux operating systems

Course objectives

By the end of the course, you should be able to meet the following objectives:

• Describe the software-defined data center (SDDC)
• Explain the vSphere components and their function in the infrastructure
• Install and configure VMware ESXi™ hosts
• Deploy and configure VMware vCenter® Server Appliance™
• Use VMware vSphere Client™ to manage the vCenter Server inventory and the vCenter Server configuration
• Manage, monitor, back up, and protect vCenter Server Appliance
• Create virtual networks with vSphere standard switches
• Describe the storage technologies supported by vSphere
• Configure virtual storage using iSCSI and NFS storage
• Create and manage VMware vSphere VMFS datastores
• Use the vSphere Client to create virtual machines, templates, clones, and snapshots
• Create a content library and deploy virtual machines from templates in the library
• Manage virtual machine resource use and manage resource pools
• Migrate virtual machines with VMware vSphere vMotion® and VMware vSphere Storage vMotion
• Create and manage a vSphere cluster that is enabled with VMware vSphere High Availability and VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler™
• Create virtual networks with VMware vSphere Distributed Switch™ and enable distributed switch features
• Discuss solutions for managing the vSphere life cycle
• Use VMware vSphere Lifecycle Manager™ to apply patches and perform upgrades to ESXi hosts and virtual machines
• Use host profiles to manage ESXi configuration compliance
• Describe how vSphere storage APIs help storage systems integrate with vSphere
• Configure and use virtual machine storage policies
• Discuss the purpose and capabilities of VMware vSphere with Kubernetes and how it fits into the VMware Tanzu™ portfolio

Detailed Course Outline

Course Introduction 

• Introductions and course logistics 
• Course objectives

Introduction to vSphere and the Software-Defined Data Center

• Explain basic virtualization concepts
• Describe how vSphere fits into the software defined data center and the cloud infrastructure
• Explain how vSphere interacts with CPUs, memory, networks, and storage
• Recognize the user interfaces for accessing the vCenter 
• Server system and ESXi hosts
• Use VMware Host Client™ to access and manage ESXi host

Virtual Machines 

• Create and remove a virtual machine
• Provision a virtual machine with virtual devices
• Identify the files that make up a virtual machine
• Explain the importance of VMware Tools™

vCenter Server 

• Describe the vCenter Server architecture
• Discuss how ESXi hosts communicate with vCenter Server
• Deploy and configure vCenter Server Appliance
• Use the vSphere Client to manage the vCenter Server inventory
• Add data center, organizational objects, and hosts to vCenter Server
• Use roles and permissions to enable users to access objects in the vCenter Server inventory
• Back up vCenter Server Appliance 
• Monitor vCenter Server tasks, events, and appliance health
• Use vCenter Server High Availability to protect a vCenter Server Appliance

Configuring and Managing Virtual Networks 

• Create and manage standard switches
• Describe the virtual switch connection types
• Configure virtual switch security, traffic-shaping and load balancing policies
• Compare vSphere distributed switches and standard switches

Configuring and Managing Virtual Storage 

• Identify storage protocols and storage device types 
• Discuss ESXi hosts using iSCSI, NFS, and fibre channel storage
• Create and manage VMFS and NFS datastores 
• Explain how multipathing works with iSCSI, NFS, and fibre channel storage
• Deploy virtual machines on a VMware vSAN™ datastore

Virtual Machine Management 

• Use templates and cloning to deploy new virtual machines
• Modify and manage virtual machines
• Create a content library and deploy virtual machines from templates in the library
• Dynamically increase the size of a virtual disk
• Use customization specification files to customize a new virtual machine
• Perform vSphere vMotion and vSphere Storage vMotion migrations
• Create and manage virtual machine snapshots
• Examine the features and functions of VMware vSphere Replication™

Resource Management and Monitoring 

• Discuss CPU and memory concepts in a virtualized environment
• Describe what overcommitment of a resource means
• Describe methods for optimizing CPU and memory usage
• Use various tools to monitor resource use
• Create and use alarms to report certain conditions or events

v Sphere Clusters 

• Describe options for making a vSphere environment highly available
• Explain the vSphere HA architecture
• Configure and manage a vSphere HA cluster
• Examine the features and functions of VMware vSphere Fault Tolerance
• Configure a vSphere cluster using ESXi Cluster Quickstart
• Describe the functions of a vSphere DRS cluster
• Create a vSphere DRS cluster

Network Scalability 

• Configure and manage vSphere distributed switches
• Describe how VMware vSphere Network I/O Control enhances performance
• Explain distributed switch features such as port mirroring and NetFlow

vSphere Lifecycle Management 

• Describe how VMware vSphere Lifecycle Manager™ works
• Use vSphere Lifecycle Manager to update ESXi hosts in a cluster

Host and Management Scalability 

• Use host profiles to manage ESXi configuration compliance
• Create and manage resource pools in a cluster

Storage Scalability

• Explain why VMware vSphere VMFS is a high performance, scalable file system
• Explain VMware vSphere Storage APIs—Array Integration, VMware vSphere API for Storage Awareness™, and vSphere APIs for I/O Filtering
• Configure and assign virtual machine storage policies
• Create VMware vSAN™ storage policies
• Configure VMware vSphere Storage DRS™ and VMware vSphere Storage I/O Control
• Discuss vSphere support for NVMe and iSER

Introduction to vSphere with Kubernetes 

• Differentiate between containers and virtual machines
• Identify the parts of a container system
• Recognize the basic architecture of Kubernetes
• Describe a basic Kubernetes workflow
• Describe the purpose of vSphere with Kubernetes and how it fits into the VMware Tanzu portfolio
• Explain the vSphere with Kubernetes supervisor cluster
• Describe the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid service