VMware vSphere Fast Track (HQ6R1S)

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
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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