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.

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

    • System administrators
    • System engineers

This course has the following prerequisites:

    • System administration experience on Microsoft Windows or Linux operating systems

Course Modules

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

Attending this course meets the training requirement to achieve the following certification:

    • VMware Certified Professional

– Data Center Virtualization (VCP-DCV)