This five-day, intensive course takes you from introductory to advanced VMware vSphere® 7 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 7, which includes VMware ESXi™ 7 and VMware vCenter Server® 7.

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

• Describe the software-defined data center (SDDC) 
• Explain the vSphere components and their function in the infrastructure 
• Install and configure VMware ESXi™ hosts 
• Deploy and configure VMware vCenter® Server Appliance™ 
• Use VMware vSphere® Client™ to manage the vCenter Server inventory and the vCenter Server configuration 
• Manage, monitor, back up, and protect vCenter Server Appliance 
• Create virtual networks with vSphere standard switches 
• Describe the storage technologies supported by vSphere 
• Configure virtual storage using iSCSI and NFS storage
• Create and manage VMware vSphere® VMFS datastores 
• Use the vSphere Client to create virtual machines, templates, clones, and snapshots 
• Create a content library and deploy virtual machines from templates in the library 
• Manage virtual machine resource use and manage resource pools 
• Migrate virtual machines with VMware vSphere® vMotion® and VMware vSphere® Storage vMotion® 
• Create and manage a vSphere cluster that is enabled with VMware vSphere® High Availability and VMware vSphere® Distributed Resource Scheduler™ 
• Create virtual networks with VMware vSphere® Distributed Switch™ and enable distributed switch features 
• Discuss solutions for managing the vSphere life cycle 
• Use VMware vSphere® Lifecycle Manager™ to apply patches and perform upgrades to ESXi hosts and virtual machines 
• Use host profiles to manage ESXi configuration compliance 
• Describe how vSphere storage APIs help storage systems integrate with vSphere 
• Configure and use virtual machine storage policies 
• Discuss the purpose and capabilities of VMware vSphere® with Kubernetes and how it fits into the VMware Tanzu™ portfolio

• System administrators
• System engineers

System administration experience on Microsoft Windows or Linux operating systems

1 Course Introduction

• Introductions and course logistics 
• Course objectives

2 Introduction to vSphere and the Software-Defined Data Center

• Explain basic virtualization concepts 
• Describe how vSphere fits into the software-defined data center and the cloud infrastructure 
• Explain how vSphere interacts with CPUs, memory, networks, and storage 
• Recognize the user interfaces for accessing the vCenter Server system and ESXi hosts 
• Use VMware Host Client™ to access and manage ESXi host

3 Virtual Machines

• Create and remove a virtual machine 
• Provision a virtual machine with virtual devices 
• Identify the files that make up a virtual machine 
• Explain the importance of VMware Tools™

4 vCenter Server

• Describe the vCenter Server architecture 
• Discuss how ESXi hosts communicate with vCenter Server 
• Deploy and configure vCenter Server Appliance 
• Use the vSphere Client to manage the vCenter Server inventory 
• Add data center, organizational objects, and hosts to vCenter Server 
• Use roles and permissions to enable users to access objects in the vCenter Server inventory 
• Back up vCenter Server Appliance 
• Monitor vCenter Server tasks, events, and appliance health 
• Use vCenter Server High Availability to protect a vCenter Server Appliance

5 Configuring and Managing Virtual Networks

• Create and manage standard switches 
• Describe the virtual switch connection types 
• Configure virtual switch security, traffic-shaping and load-balancing policies 
• Compare vSphere distributed switches and standard switches

6 Configuring and Managing Virtual Storage

• Identify storage protocols and storage device types 
• Discuss ESXi hosts using iSCSI, NFS, and Fibre Channel storage 
• Create and manage VMFS and NFS datastores 
• Explain how multipathing works with iSCSI, NFS, and Fibre Channel storage 
• Deploy virtual machines on a VMware vSAN™ datastore

7 Virtual Machine Management

• Use templates and cloning to deploy new virtual machines 
• Modify and manage virtual machines 
• Create a content library and deploy virtual machines from templates in the library 
• Dynamically increase the size of a virtual disk 
• Use customization specification files to customize a new virtual machine 
• Perform vSphere vMotion and vSphere Storage vMotion migrations 
• Create and manage virtual machine snapshots 
• Examine the features and functions of VMware vSphere® Replication™

8 Resource Management and Monitoring

• Discuss CPU and memory concepts in a virtualized environment 
• Describe what overcommitment of a resource means 
• Describe methods for optimizing CPU and memory usage 
• Use various tools to monitor resource use 
• Create and use alarms to report certain conditions or events

9 vSphere Clusters

• Describe options for making a vSphere environment highly available 
• Explain the vSphere HA architecture 
• Configure and manage a vSphere HA cluster 
• Examine the features and functions of VMware vSphere® Fault Tolerance 
• Configure a vSphere cluster using ESXi Cluster Quickstart 
• Describe the functions of a vSphere DRS cluster 
• Create a vSphere DRS cluster

10 Network Scalability

• Configure and manage vSphere distributed switches 
• Describe how VMware vSphere® Network I/O Control enhances performance 
• Explain distributed switch features such as port mirroring and NetFlow

11 vSphere Lifecycle Management

• Describe how VMware vSphere® Lifecycle Manager™ works 
• Use vSphere Lifecycle Manager to update ESXi hosts in a cluster

12 Host and Management Scalability

• Use host profiles to manage ESXi configuration compliance 
• Create and manage resource pools in a cluster

13 Storage Scalability

• Explain why VMware vSphere® VMFS is a high-performance, scalable file system 
• Explain VMware vSphere® Storage APIs - Array Integration, VMware vSphere® API for Storage Awareness™, and vSphere APIs for I/O Filtering 
• Configure and assign virtual machine storage policies 
• Create VMware vSAN™ storage policies 
• Configure VMware vSphere® Storage DRS™ and VMware vSphere® Storage I/O Control 
• Discuss vSphere support for NVMe and iSER

14 Introduction to vSphere with Kubernetes

• Differentiate between containers and virtual machines 
• Identify the parts of a container system 
• Recognize the basic architecture of Kubernetes 
• Describe a basic Kubernetes workflow 
• Describe the purpose of vSphere with Kubernetes and how it fits into the VMware Tanzu portfolio 
• Explain the vSphere with Kubernetes supervisor cluster 
• Describe the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid service