VMware vSphere Fast Track Program [V7.0]

Course Overview

This five-day, intensive VMware Fast track 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

This course is a combination of the main modules of the courses:

• VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage (VSICM)
  +
• VMware vSphere: Optimize and Scale (VSOS).

Target Audience

• System administrators
• System engineers

Course Objectives

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

Course Content

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

Course Prerequisites

This course has the following prerequisites:

• System administration experience on Microsoft Windows or Linux operating systems

Follow on Courses

• VSD - VMware vSphere: Design
• VST - VMware vSphere: Troubleshooting