This course provides hands-on training to equip students with a range of skills—from performing routine VMware vSphere® 7 administrative tasks to complex vSphere operations and configurations. Through lab-based activities, students are immersed in real-life situations faced by VMBeans, a fictitious company. These situations expose students to real life scenarios faced by companies that are building and scaling their virtual infrastructures.

Approximately 90% of the class is application-focused and taught through labs. The course aligns fully with the VMware Certified Advanced Professional – Data Center Virtualization Deploy exam objectives.

Audience

• System administrators
• System engineers

Prerequisites

This course requires the following:

• Completion of the VMware vSphere: Optimize and Scale [V7] course
• VMware Certified Professional – Data Center Virtualization (VCP-DCV) certification
• System administration experience on Microsoft Windows or Linux operating systems

Course objectives

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

• Configure and manage complex storage solutions in a vSphere environment (NFS, iSCSI, etc.)
• Configure and manage complex, scalable vSphere networking operations (vSphere standard switch and distributed switches)
• Deploy, manage, and optimize virtual machines (advanced configuration, content library, latency-sensitive workloads, etc.)
• Manage business continuity and operations in the vSphere environment (VMware vCenter® Server Appliance™ file-based backup, VMware vCenter Server® profiles, host profiles, etc.)
• Plan and implement increased vSphere security (use a key provider, VM encryption, CPU scheduler remediation, etc.)
• Troubleshoot the vSphere environment
• Use VMware vSphere® Lifecycle Manager™ to upgrade to VMware ESXi™ hosts and virtual machines (VUM, image-based clusters, etc.)
• Implement vSphere cluster solutions (Cluster QuickStart wizard, VMware vSphere® Distributed Resource Scheduler™, VMware vSphere® High Availability, VMware vSAN™, etc.)
• Implement resource optimizations to streamline vSphere deployments
• Create an advanced configuration of vCenter Server (including an identity source)

Detailed Course Outline

Course Introduction 

• Introductions and course logistics
• Course objectives
• Introduction to fictitious company: VMBeans

Configure and Manage Your vSphere Environment 

• Perform various vCenter Server configurations
• Configure an external identity source
• Configure virtual networking with advanced options
• Configure and manage advanced storage configurations
• Configure vSphere clusters (also using Cluster QuickStart)

Management and Operations in Your Data Center Collect vSphere log files

• Configure vCenter Server file-based backup
• Working with vCenter Server profiles
• Configure and manage advanced cluster settings
• Create and configure advanced host options
• Create and manage host profiles
• Manage and remediate clusters using vSphere Lifecycle Manager
• Create and configure a Content Library
• Update a managed virtual machine template
• Configure a central VMware Tools™ installation repository
• Manage vSphere roles and permissions

Troubleshoot Your Data Center Environment 

• Troubleshoot vSphere configuration issues
• Troubleshoot resource pool configuration issues
• Troubleshoot network and storage issues
• Troubleshoot ESXi host issues
• Troubleshoot vCenter Server resource issues

Increasing Security in Your Data Center 

• Create and manage a key management solution
• Create an encrypted virtual machine
• Configure CPU scheduler options to achieve security remediation

Performance and Optimization in Your Data Center 

• Manage advanced virtual machine configurations 
• Identify and implement vSphere resource optimization opportunities