Course Overview
This five-day course features intensive hands-on training that focuses on installing, configuring, and managing VMware vSphere 8, which includes VMware ESXi™ 8 and VMware vCenter® 8. This course prepares you to administer a vSphere infrastructure for an organization of any size.
This course is the foundation for most VMware technologies in the software-defined data center.
Product Alignment
- VMware ESXi 8.0
- VMware vCenter 8.0
Course Content
Course Introduction
- Introductions and course logistics
- Course objectives
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
Installing and Configuring ESXi
- Install an ESXi host
- Recognize ESXi user account best practices
- Configure the ESXi host settings using the DCUI and VMware Host Client
Deploying and Configuring vCenter
- 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 vCenter logs and events
Configuring 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
Configuring 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
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
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
Deploying and Configuring vSphere Clusters
- Create a vSphere cluster enabled for vSphere DRS and vSphere HA
- 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 various types of failures
- Identify options for configuring network redundancy in a vSphere HA cluster
- Recognize vSphere HA design considerations
- Recognize the use cases for various vSphere HA settings
- Configure a vSphere HA cluster
- Recognize when to use vSphere Fault Tolerance
Managing the vSphere Lifecycle
- Enable vSphere Lifecycle Manager in a vSphere cluster
- Describe features of the vCenter Update Planner
- Run vCenter upgrade prechecks and interoperability reports
- Recognize features of VMware vSphere® Lifecycle Manager™
- Distinguish between managing hosts using baselines and managing hosts using images
- Describe how to update hosts using baselines
- Describe ESXi images
- Validate ESXi host compliance against a cluster image and update ESXi hosts
- Update ESXi hosts using vSphere Lifecycle Manager
- Describe vSphere Lifecycle Manager automatic recommendations
- Use vSphere Lifecycle Manager to upgrade VMware Tools and VM hardware
Who should attend
- System administrators
- System engineers
Prerequisites
This course has the following prerequisites:
- System administration experience on Microsoft Windows or Linux operating systems
Course Objectives
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
- Create 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
- Create content libraries for managing templates and deploying virtual machines
- Manage virtual machine resource allocation
- Migrate virtual machines with VMware vSphere® vMotion® and VMware vSphere® Storage vMotion®
- Create and configure a vSphere cluster that is enabled with VMware vSphere® High Availability and VMware vSphere® Distributed Resource Scheduler™
- Manage the life cycle of vSphere to keep vCenter, ESXi hosts, and virtual machines up to date