During this five-day, intensive course, you gain the knowledge, skills, and tools to plan and deploy a VMware vSAN™ cluster. You learn about managing and operating vSAN. 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 focus on learning the tools and skills necessary to troubleshoot vSAN 7 implementations and gain practical experience with vSAN troubleshooting concepts through the completion of instructor-led activities and hands-on lab exercises.

This course is a combination of the following courses: VMware vSAN: Plan and Deploy, VMware vSAN: Management and Operations, and VMware vSAN: Troubleshooting.

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

• • Describe vSAN concepts
• • Detail the underlying vSAN architecture and components
• • Explain the key features and use cases for vSAN
• • Identify requirements and planning considerations for vSAN clusters
• • Describe the different vSAN deployment options
• • Explain how to configure vSAN fault domains
• • Detail how to define and create a VM Storage policy
• • Discuss the impact of vSAN storage policy changes
• • Describe vSAN storage space efficiency
• • Explain how vSAN encryption works
• • Identify requirements to configure vSAN iSCSI target
• • Detail HCI Mesh technology and architecture
• • Detail vSAN file service architecture and configuration
• • Explain the use cases of vSAN Direct
• • Describe how to setup stretched and two-node vSAN clusters
• • Explain the importance vSAN node hardware compatibility
• • Describe the use of VMware vSphere® Lifecycle Manager™ to automate driver and firmware installations
• • Detail vSAN resilience and data availability
• • Discuss the vSAN cluster backup methodology

Storage and virtual infrastructure consultants, solution architects, and administrators who are responsible for production support and administration of VMware vSAN [v7]

1 Course Introduction

• • Introductions and course logistics
• • Course objectives

2 Introduction to vSAN

• • Describe vSAN architecture
• • Describe the vSAN software components: CLOM, DOM, LSOM, CMMDS, and RDT
• • Identify vSAN objects and components
• • Describe the advantages of object-based storage
• • Describe the difference between All-Flash and Hybrid vSAN architecture
• • Explain the key features and use cases for vSAN
• • Discuss the vSAN integration and compatibility with other VMware technologies

3 Planning a vSAN Cluster

• • Identify requirements and planning considerations for vSAN clusters
• • Apply vSAN cluster planning and deployment best practices
• • Determine and plan for storage consumption by data growth and failure tolerance
• • Design vSAN hosts for operational needs
• • Identify vSAN networking features and requirements
• • Describe ways of controlling traffic in a vSAN environment
• • Recognize best practices for vSAN network configurations

4 Deploying a vSAN Cluster

• • 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 Life Cycle Manager to perform upgrades
• • Deploy and configure a vSAN Cluster using Cluster Quickstart wizard
• • Manually configure a vSAN Cluster using vSphere Client
• • Explain and configure vSAN fault domains
• • Using vSphere HA with vSAN
• • Understand vSAN Cluster maintenance capabilities
• • Describe the difference between implicit and explicit fault domains
• • Create explicit fault domains

5 vSAN Storage Policies

• • Describe a vSAN Object
• • Describe how objects are split into components
• • Explain the purpose of witness components
• • Explain how vSAN stores large objects
• • View object and component placement on the vSAN Datastore
• • Explain how storage policies work with vSAN
• • Define and create a virtual machine storage policy
• • Apply and modify virtual machine storage policies
• • Change virtual machine storage policies dynamically
• • Identify virtual machine storage policy compliance status

6 vSAN Resilience and Data Availability

• • 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

7 Configuring 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