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.

Product Alignment
•  ESXi 7
•  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 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

Certifications
Attendance of this course meets the training requirement to achieve the following certification:
•  VMware Certified Professional – Data Center Virtualization (VCP-DCV)

•  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

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
•  Describe the ESXi host architecture
•  Navigate the Direct Console User Interface (DCUI) to configure an ESXi host
•  Recognize ESXi host user account best practices
•  Install an ESXi host
•  Use VMware Host Client™ to configure ESXi host settings

3  Virtual Machines
•  Create and provision a virtual machine
•  Explain the importance of VMware Tools™
•  Install VMware Tools
•  Identify the files that make up a VM
•  Recognize the components of a VM
•  Recognize virtual devices supported by a VM
•  Describe the benefits and use cases for containers
•  Identify the parts of a container system

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
•  Recognize the components of a VMware vSAN™ configuration

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
•  Use customization specification files to customize a new virtual machine
•  Perform vSphere vMotion and vSphere Storage vMotion migrations
•  Describe Enhanced vMotion Compatibility
•  Create and manage virtual machine snapshots
•  Examine the features and functions of VMware vSphere® Replication™
•  Describe the benefits of vSphere Storage APIs – Data Protection

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 the functions of a vSphere DRS cluster
•  Create a vSphere DRS cluster
•  Monitor a vSphere cluster configuration
•  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

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
•  Recognize the importance of vCenter Server Update Planner
•  Describe how VMware vSphere® Lifecycle Manager™ works
•  Describe how to update ESXi hosts using baselines
•  Validate ESXi host compliance using a cluster image
•  Describe how to upgrade VMware Tools and VM hardware

12  Host and Management Scalability
•  Use host profiles to manage ESXi configuration compliance
•  Create and manage resource pools in a cluster
•  Describe how scalable shares work

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
•  Recognize components of the vSphere Virtual Volumes architecture
•  Configure VMware vSphere® Storage DRS™ and VMware vSphere® Storage I/O Control