VMware vSphere: Fast Track [V8] (EDU-VSFT8)

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.


Audience

  • System administrators
  • System engineers


Prerequisites

This course has the following prerequisites:

  • System administration experience on Microsoft Windows or Linux operating systems


Objectives

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

  • Install and configure ESXi hosts
  • Deploy and configure vCenter
  • Use the vSphere Client to create the vCenter inventory and assign roles to vCenter users
  • Configure vCenter High Availability
  • Create and configure virtual networks using vSphere standard switches and distributed switches
  • Create and configure datastores using storage technologies supported by vSphere
  • Use the vSphere Client to create virtual machines, templates, clones, and snapshots
  • Configure and manage a VMware Tools Repository
  • Create content libraries for managing templates and deploying virtual machines
  • Manage virtual machine resource use
  • Migrate virtual machines with vSphere vMotion and vSphere Storage vMotion
  • Create and configure a vSphere cluster that is enabled with vSphere High Availability and vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler
  • Manage the life cycle of vSphere to keep vCenter, ESXi hosts, and virtual machines up to date
  • Configure and manage vSphere networking and storage for a large and sophisticated enterprise
  • Use host profiles to manage VMware ESXi host compliance
  • Monitor the vCenter, ESXi, and VMs performance in the vSphere client


Product Alignment

  • VMware ESXi 8.0
  • VMware vCenter 8.0
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Course Outline

1 Course Introduction

  • Introductions and course logistics
  • Course objectives


2 vSphere and Virtualization Overview

  • Explain basic virtualization concepts
  • Describe how vSphere fits in the software-defined data center and the cloud infrastructure
  • Recognize the user interfaces for accessing vSphere
  • Explain how vSphere interacts with CPUs, memory, networks, storage, and GPUs
  • Install an ESXi host


3 vCenter Management

  • Recognize ESXi hosts communication with vCenter
  • Deploy vCenter Server Appliance
  • Configure vCenter settings
  • Use the vSphere Client to add and manage license keys
  • Create and organize vCenter inventory objects
  • Recognize the rules for applying vCenter permissions
  • View vSphere tasks and events
  • Create a vCenter backup schedule
  • Recognize the importance of vCenter High Availability
  • Explain how vCenter High Availability works


4 Configure and Manage vSphere Networking

  • Configure and view standard switch configurations
  • Configure and view distributed switch configurations
  • Recognize the difference between standard switches and distributed switches
  • Explain how to set networking policies on standard and distributed switches


5 Configure and Manage vSphere Storage

  • Recognize vSphere storage technologies
  • Identify types of vSphere datastores
  • Describe Fibre Channel components and addressing
  • Describe iSCSI components and addressing
  • Configure iSCSI storage on ESXi
  • Create and manage VMFS datastores
  • Configure and manage NFS datastores
  • Discuss vSphere support for NVMe and iSER technologies


6 Deploying Virtual Machines

  • Create and provision VMs
  • Explain the importance of VMware Tools
  • Identify the files that make up a VM
  • Recognize the components of a VM
  • Navigate the vSphere Client and examine VM settings and options
  • Modify VMs by dynamically increasing resources
  • Create VM templates and deploy VMs from them
  • Clone VMs
  • Create customization specifications for guest operating systems
  • Create local, published, and subscribed content libraries
  • Deploy VMs from content libraries
  • Manage multiple versions of VM templates in content libraries


7 Managing Virtual Machines

  • Recognize the types of VM migrations that you can perform within a vCenter instance and across vCenter instances
  • Migrate VMs using vSphere vMotion
  • Describe the role of Enhanced vMotion Compatibility in migrations
  • Migrate VMs using vSphere Storage vMotion
  • Take a snapshot of a VM
  • Manage, consolidate, and delete snapshots
  • Describe CPU and memory concepts in relation to a virtualized environment
  • Describe how VMs compete for resources
  • Define CPU and memory shares, reservations, and limits
  • Recognize the role of a VMware Tools Repository
  • Configure a VMware Tools Repository
  • Recognize the backup and restore solution for VMs


8 vSphere Cluster Management

  • Use Cluster Quickstart to enable vSphere cluster services and configure the cluster
  • View information about a vSphere cluster
  • Explain how vSphere DRS determines VM placement on hosts in the cluster
  • Recognize use cases for vSphere DRS settings
  • Monitor a vSphere DRS cluster
  • Describe how vSphere HA responds to different types of failures
  • Identify options for configuring network redundancy in a vSphere HA cluster
  • Recognize the use cases for various vSphere HA settings
  • Configure a cluster enabled for vSphere DRS and vSphere HA
  • Recognize when to use vSphere Fault Tolerance
  • Describe the function of the vCLS
  • Recognize operations that might disrupt the healthy functioning of vCLS VMs


9 Managing the vSphere Lifecycle

  • Generate vCenter interoperability reports
  • Recognize features of vSphere Lifecycle Manager
  • Describe ESXi images and image depots
  • Enable vSphere Lifecycle Manager in a vSphere cluster
  • Validate ESXi host compliance against a cluster image and remediate ESXi hosts using vSphere Lifecycle Manager
  • Describe vSphere Lifecycle Manager automatic recommendations
  • Use vSphere Lifecycle Manager to upgrade VMware Tools and VM hardware


10 Network Operations

  • Configure and manage vSphere distributed switches
  • Describe how VMware vSphere Network I/O Control enhances performance
  • Define vSphere Distributed Services Engine
  • Describe the use cases and benefits of vSphere Distributed Services Engine


11 Storage Operations

  • Describe the architecture and requirements of vSAN configuration
  • Describe storage policy-based management
  • Recognize components in the vSphere Virtual Volumes architecture
  • Configure Storage I/O Control


12 ESXi Operations

  • Use host profiles to manage ESXi configuration compliance
  • Recognize the benefits of using configuration profiles


13 vSphere Monitoring

  • Monitor the key factors that can affect a virtual machine's performance
  • Describe the factors that influence vCenter performance
  • Use vCenter tools to monitor resource use
  • Create custom alarms in vCenter
  • Describe the benefits and capabilities of VMware Skyline
  • Recognize uses for Skyline Advisor Pro