In this three-day course, you learn about managing and operating VMware vSAN™ 7. This course focuses on building the required skills for common Day-2 vSAN administrator tasks such as, vSAN node management, cluster maintenance, security operations and advanced vSAN cluster operations. You also gain practical experience through the completion of instructor-led activities and hands-on lab exercises.

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

    Define the tasks involved in vSAN node management
    Updating and upgrading vSAN using VMware vSphere Lifecycle Manager™
    Explain vSAN resilience and data availability features
    Reconfigure vSAN storage policies and observe the cluster-wide impact
    Perform vSAN cluster scale-out and scale-up operations
    Describe common vSAN cluster maintenance operations
    Control vSAN resync operations
    Configure vSAN storage efficiency and reclamation features
    Use VMware Skyline™ Health to monitor cluster health, performance, and storage capacity
    Describe vSAN security operations
    Configure vSAN Direct for cloud native applications
    Configure remote vSAN datastore and vSAN native file services
    Manage two-node cluster and stretched cluster advance operations

Storage and virtual infrastructure administrators who are responsible for production support and administration of VMware vSAN 7.

Completion of the following courses is required:

    VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage [v7] or equivalent knowledge
    VMware vSAN: Plan and Deploy [v7]

 Course Introduction

    Introductions and course logistics
    Course objectives

vSAN Node Management

    Recognize the importance of hardware compatibility
    Ensure the compatibility of driver and firmware versioning
    Use tools to automate driver validation and installation
    Apply host hardware settings for optimum performance
    Use vSphere Lifecycle Manager to perform upgrades

vSAN Resilience and Data Availability Operations

    Describe vSAN storage policies
    Recognize the impact of a vSAN storage policy change
    Describe and configure the Object Repair Timer advanced option
    Plan disk replacement in a vSAN cluster
    Plan maintenance tasks to avoid vSAN object failures
    Recognize the importance of managing snapshot utilization in a vSAN cluster
    Configure the vSAN fault domains

vSAN Cluster Maintenance

    Perform typical vSAN maintenance operations
    Describe vSAN maintenance modes and data evacuation options
    Assess the impact on cluster objects of entering maintenance mode
    Determine the specific data actions required after exiting maintenance mode
    Define the steps to shut down and reboot hosts and vSAN clusters
    Use best practices for boot devices
    Replace vSAN nodes

vSAN Storage Space Efficiency

    Discuss deduplication and compression techniques
    Understand deduplication and compression overhead
    Discuss compression only mode
    Configure erasure coding
    Configure swap object thin provisioning 
    Discuss reclaiming storage space with SCSI UNMAP
    Configure TRIM/UNMAP

vSAN Cluster Performance Monitoring

    Describe how the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP) enables VMware to improve products and services
    Use vSphere Skyline Health for monitoring vSAN cluster health
    Manage alerts, alarms, and notifications related to vSAN in VMware vSphere® Client™
    Create and configure custom alarms to trigger vSAN health issues
    Use IO Insight metrics for monitoring vSAN performance
    Analyse vsantop performance metrics
    Use a vSAN proactive test to detect and diagnose cluster issues

vSAN Security Operations

    Identify differences between VM encryption and vSAN encryption
    Perform ongoing operations to maintain data security
    Describe the workflow of data-in transit encryption
    Identify the steps involved in replacing Key Management Server (KMS)

vSAN Direct

    Discuss the use cases for vSAN Direct
    Understand the overall architecture of vSAN Direct
    Describe the workflow of vSAN Direct datastore creation
    Explore how vSAN Direct works with storage policy tagging

Remote vSAN

    Discuss the use cases for remote vSAN
    Understand the high-level architecture
    Describe remote datastore operations
    Discuss the network requirement
    Interoperability between remote vSAN and VMware vSphere® High Availability

vSAN Native File Service

    Discuss the use cases for vSAN file service
    Understand the high-level architecture of vSAN file service
    Discuss the authentication model
    Configure file shares
    Monitor file share health and capacity utilization

Manage Advanced vSAN Cluster Operations

    Describe the architecture for stretched clusters and two-node clusters
    Understand the importance of witness node
    Describe how stretched cluster storage policies affect vSAN objects
    Create and apply a vSAN stretched cluster policy to meet specific needs
    Discuss stretched cluster failure scenarios and responses