Duration:

5 days

Audience:

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

Prerequisites:

Required prerequisites include completion of one of the following courses:

  • VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage
  • VMware vSphere: What´s New
  • Equivalent knowledge and administration experience with ESXi and vCenter Server

Course Description:

In this course, you will gain the advanced skills for configuring and maintaining a highly available and scalable virtual infrastructure. Through a mix of lecture and hands-on labs, you will configure and optimize the vSphere features that build a foundation for a truly scalable infrastructure and discuss when and where these features have the greatest effect. Anyone who is ready to take their understanding of vSphere to a deeper level and learn how to use advanced features and controls will greatly benefit from this course.

What You’ll Learn:

  • Configure and manage ESXi networking and storage for a large and sophisticated enterprise
  • Manage changes to the vSphere environment
  • Optimize the performance of all vSphere components
  • Harden the vSphere environment against security threats
  • Troubleshoot operational faults and identify their root causes
  • Use VMware vSphere ESXi Shell and VMware vSphere Management Assistant to manage vSphere
  • Use VMware vSphere Auto Deploy to provision ESXi hosts

Who Needs to Attend

  • Experienced system administrators
  • Systems engineers
  • System integrators

Course Outline:

1. Course Introduction

  • Introductions and course logistics
  • Course objectives
  • Additional resources

2. VMware Management Resources

  • Understand the purpose of VMware vSphere Command-Line Interface commands
  • Discuss options for running vSphere CLI commands
  • Deploy and configure vSphere Management Assistant
  • Use vmware-cmd for virtual machine operations

3. vSphere Security

  • Describe the features and benefits of the Platform Services Controller
  • Configure ESXi host access and authorization
  • Secure ESXi, vCenter Server, and virtual machines

4. Performance in a Virtualized Environment

  • Review the vSphere performance troubleshooting methodology
  • Explain software and hardware virtualization techniques and their effects on performance
  • Use vSphere performance monitoring tools

5. Network Scalability

  • Create, configure, and manage vSphere distributed switches
  • Migrate virtual machines from standard switches to distributed switches
  • Explain distributed switch features such as port mirroring, LACP, QoS tagging, and NetFlow

6. Network Performance Troubleshooting

  • Explain the performance features of network adapters
  • Explain the performance features of vSphere networking
  • Monitor key network performance metrics
  • Use vSphere Management Assistant to manage virtual network configurations
  • Troubleshoot common network performance problems

7. Storage Scalability

  • Explain vSphere storage APIs for array integration and storage awareness
  • Configure and assign virtual machine storage policies
  • Configure VMware vSphere Storage DRS and VMware vSphere Storage I/O Control
  • Create and use virtual volumes in vSphere

8. Storage Optimization

  • Diagnose storage access problems
  • Configure VMware vSphere Flash Read Cache
  • Monitor key storage performance metrics
  • Troubleshoot common storage performance problems

9. CPU Performance

  • Explain the CPU scheduler operation, NUMA support, and other features that affect CPU performance
  • Monitor key CPU performance metrics
  • Troubleshoot common CPU performance problems

10. Memory Performance

  • Explain ballooning, memory compression, and host swapping techniques for memory reclamation when memory is overcommitted
  • Monitor key memory performance metrics
  • Troubleshoot common memory performance problems

11. Virtual Machine and Cluster Optimization

  • Describe guidelines for optimizing virtual machine configuration
  • Discuss how vGPU usage affects virtual machine performance
  • Discuss guidelines for using resource allocation settings
  • Discuss guidelines for using resource pools
  • Discuss guidelines for using vSphere DRS clusters
  • Troubleshoot common vSphere cluster problems

12. Host and Management Scalability

  • Describe and use host profiles
  • Define and use content libraries
  • Upgrade ESXi and vCenter Server instances
  • Use VMware vSphere PowerCLI
  • Use Virtual Machine Converter
  • Use VMware vSphere ESXi Image Builder CLI and vSphere Auto Deploy

Labs

You will spend approximately 40% of class time completing hands-on labs.