Training Duration:

5 days

Audience:

Employees of federal, state and local governments; and businesses working with the government.

Prerequisites:

  • System administration experience on Microsoft Windows or Linux operating systems
  • Understanding of virtual data center concepts comparable to those needed for VCA-DCV certification

Course Overview:

This five-day course features intensive hands-on training that focuses on installing, configuring, and managing VMware vSphere 7, which includes VMware ESXi 7 and VMware vCenter Server 7. This course prepares you to administer a vSphere infrastructure for an organization of any size.
This course is the foundation for most of the other VMware technologies in the software-defined data center.

Upon completion of this training, participants will be able to:

  • 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
  • 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
  • Discuss solutions for managing the vSphere life cycle
  • Use VMware vSphere Update Manager to apply patches and perform upgrades to ESXi hosts and
    virtual machines

This training session is intended for:

  • System administrators
  • Systems engineers

Training 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

vSphere Cluster

  • 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

vSphere Lifecycle

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

Labs

You will spend approximately 45% of class time completing hands-on labs.