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