This five-day, intensive course takes you from introductory to advanced VMware vSphere® 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 6.7. 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 6.7, which includes VMware ESXi™ 6.7 and VMware vCenter Server® 6.7.

Product Alignment
•  ESXi 6.7
•  vCenter Server 6.7

By the end of the course, you should be able to meet the following objectives:
•  Install and configure ESXi hosts
•  Deploy and configure VMware vCenter® Server Appliance™
•  Use VMware Host Client™, VMware vSphere® Web Client, and VMware vSphere® Client™ to manage  the vCenter Server inventory and the vCenter Server configuration
•  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 vSphere Client to create virtual machines, templates, clones, and snapshots
•  Create a content library for deploying virtual machines
•  Manage virtual machine resource usage and manage resource pools
•  Migrate virtual machines with VMware vSphere® vMotion® and VMware vSphere® Storage vMotion®
•  Describe the methods for protecting and recovering virtual machine data
•  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
•  Use VMware vSphere® Update 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
•  Configure VMware vSphere® Storage I/O Control and VMware vSphere® Storage DRS™
•  Encrypt virtual machines for additional security

•  System administrators
•  System engineers

This course has the following prerequisites:
•  System administration experience on Microsoft Windows or Linux operating systems

1  Course Introduction
•  Introductions and course logistics
•  Course objectives
•  Describe the content of this course
•  Gain a complete picture of the VMware certification system
•  Familiarize yourself with the benefits of the VMware Education Learning Zone
•  Identify additional resources

2  Introduction to vSphere and the Software-Defined Data Center
•  Describe how vSphere fits into the software-defined data center and the cloud infrastructure
•  Explain how vSphere interacts with CPUs, memory, networks, and storage
•  Use vSphere Client to access and manage your vCenter Server system and ESXi host
•  Compare virtual machine hardware version 14 to other versions
•  Identify the virtual network adapters, and describe the enhanced VMXNET3
•  Compare the types of virtual disk provisioning
•  Install and configure ESXi host settings
•  Identify the advantages of ESXi Quick Boot

3  Creating Virtual Machines
•  Create, provision, and remove a virtual machine
•  Explain the importance of VMware Tools™
•  Describe how to import a virtual appliance OVF template

4  vCenter Server
•  Describe the vCenter Server architecture
•  Discuss how ESXi hosts communicate with vCenter Server
•  Access and configure vCenter Server Appliance
•  Use vSphere Client to manage the vCenter Server inventory
•  Add data center, organizational objects, and hosts to vCenter Server
•  Create custom inventory tags
•  Describe the rules for applying permissions
•  Create a custom role in vCenter Server
•  Create a vCenter Server Appliance backup schedule
•  Restore vCenter Server Appliance from a backup
•  Monitor vCenter Server Appliance

5  Configuring and Managing Virtual Networks
•  Describe, create, and manage standard switches
•  Configure virtual switch security, traffic-shaping and load-balancing policies
•  Compare vSphere distributed switches and standard switches
•  Describe the virtual switch connection types
•  Describe the new TCP/IP stack architecture
•  Use VLANs with 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 VMware vSphere® VMFS and NFS datastores
•  Explain how multipathing works with iSCSI, NFS, and Fibre Channel storage
•  Identify the advantages of VMware vSAN™

7  Virtual Machine Management
•  Use templates and cloning to deploy new virtual machines
•  Modify and manage virtual machines
•  Create an instant clone of a virtual machine
•  Identify the types of content libraries and how to deploy and use them
•  Add a hot-pluggable device
•  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

8  Resource Management and Monitoring
•  Discuss CPU and memory concepts in a virtualized environment
•  Describe what overcommitment of a resource means
•  Identify additional technologies that improve memory usage
•  Configure and manage resource pools
•  Describe methods for optimizing CPU and memory usage
•  Use various tools to monitor resource usage
•  Create and use alarms to report certain conditions or events

9  vSphere HA, vSphere Fault Tolerance, and Protecting Data
•  Explain the vSphere HA architecture
•  Configure and manage a vSphere HA cluster
•  Use vSphere HA advanced parameters
•  Enforce infrastructural or intra-app dependencies during failover
•  Describe vSphere HA heartbeat networks and datastore heartbeats
•  Examine the features and functions of vSphere Fault Tolerance
•  Enable vSphere Fault Tolerance on virtual machines
•  Support vSphere Fault Tolerance interoperability with vSAN
•  Examine enhanced consolidation of vSphere Fault Tolerance virtual machines
•  Examine the features and functions of vSphere Replication

10  vSphere DRS
•  Describe the functions of a vSphere DRS cluster
•  Create a vSphere DRS cluster
•  View information about a vSphere DRS cluster
•  Configure virtual machine affinity, DRS groups, and VM-host affinity rules
•  Remove a host from a vSphere DRS cluster

11  Network Scalability
•  Configure and manage vSphere distributed switches
•  Explain distributed features such as port mirroring, LACP, QoS tagging, and NetFlow
•  Configuring port mirroring on a distributed switch

12  vSphere Update Manager and Host Maintenance
•  Describe the architecture, components, and capabilities of vSphere Update Manager
•  Use vSphere Update Manager to manage the patching of ESXi, virtual machines, and vApps
•  Examine the features and functions of vSphere Update Manager EAM integration
•  Integrate vSphere Update Manager with vSphere DRS
•  Describe and use host profiles

13  Storage Scalability
•  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
•  Configure vSphere Storage DRS and Storage I/O Control

14  Securing Virtual Machines
•  Set up encryption in your vSphere environment
•  Encrypt virtual machines
•  Encrypt core dumps
•  Enable encrypted vSphere vMotion
•  Describe support for virtual machine security features, such as UEFI secure boot, vTPM, and virtualization-  based security