VMWARE

Course Number:

Audience:

Prerequisites:

Attendees should have user, operator or administrator experience on common operating systems such as Microsoft Windows®, Linux™, UNIX™, etc. Experience installing, configuring and managing operating systems, storage systems or networks is useful but not required. We assume that all attendees have a basic familiarity with PC server hardware, disk partitioning, IP addressing, O/S installation, networking, etc.

• Explain the many significant benefits of virtualization
• Install ESXi Server according to best practices
• Upgrade and use Host Client to manage standalone ESXi hosts
• Create virtual and virtual to physical network configurations
• Configure and manage local storage resources
• Use vSwitch policies to improve network security
• Explain and select the optimal pNIC teaming strategy for network availability and performance
• Implement Jumbo Frames to improve network throughput and reduce protocol overhead
• Define and use file share (NAS / NFS) datastores
• Create virtual machines, install operating systems and applications
• Install, configure and upgrade VMware Tools
• Install, configure and update the Platform Service Controller and vCenter Server Appliance
• Use rapid deployment to consistently and quickly deploy new virtual machines
• Create clones – one-time copies of virtual machine
• Use Guest OS customization to rapidly configure new VMs according to requirements
• Configure and use hotplug hardware including hot-add vCPUs and Memory
• Add and grow virtual disks including system disks and secondary volumes
• Configure and use roles. Add, manage, monitor and secure users and groups
• Understand the benefits and tradeoffs of network attached storage and Fibre, iSCSI SANs
• Configure and use shared SAN storage including Fibre SAN, iSCSI SAN
• Use Raw Device Maps to give VMs direct connectivity to SAN volumes
• Create VMFS 5 datastores. Extend VMFS datastores using LUN spanning and expansion
• Explain and use VMware’s three multipathing policies for storage performance and availability
• Use vCenter alarms to monitor ESXi, VM, storage and network health, performance, state
• Use Resource Pools to delegate host / cluster pCPU, pRAM to meet Service Level Agreements
• Perform VM cold migrations, hot migrations and Storage VMotion
• Configure and manage server CPU and Memory capacity and maintain VM responsiveness with Distributed Resource Schedule load balanced clusters
• Use HA to minimize VM down time due to ESXi host failures, storage network failures or SAN failures
• Use VMware Fault Tolerance to eliminate VM down time due to host, network or storage failures
• Implement a disaster recovery strategy using VMware Replication
• Use vSphere Replication to hot replicate and recover business critical Virtual Machines
• Patch and update ESXi servers using vCenter Update Manager
• Monitor and tune ESXi hosts and virtual machine for best performance
• Build, configure, and use distributed virtual switches. Migrate hosts and networking to dvSwitches
• Troubleshoot common problems

• Virtualization Infrastructure Overview
  • Virtualization explained
  • How VMware virtualization compares to traditional PC deployments
  • Common pain points in PC Server management
  • How virtualization effectively addresses common IT issues
  • VMware vSphere software products
  • What’s New and Improved in vSphere 6.5

• How to Install, Configure ESXi 6.5
  • Understanding ESXi
  • Selecting, validating and preparing your server
  • Storage controllers, disks and partitions
  • Software installation and best practices
  • Joining ESXi to a Domain
  • Local User Management and Policies
  • First look at the VMware vSphere Client and VMware Host Client

• Virtual and Physical Networking
  • vNetwork standard and distributed virtual Switches
  • Virtual Switches, Ports and Port Groups
  • Creating VMkernel ports
  • Creating, sizing and customizing Virtual Switches

• Advanced Networking
  • Use vSwitch Security policies to defend against malicious VM network activity
  • Explain and implement all five physical NIC team policies
  • Improve network health and fault detection by beaconing
  • How to enable and test Jumbo Frames

• Connecting to and Using NAS Shared Storage
  • Benefits shared storage offer to virtual infrastructure
  • NFS overview
  • Configuring ESXi to use NFS shares
  • Configuring NFS for performance and redundancy
  • NFS use cases
  • Troubleshooting NFS connections

•  Virtual Hardware and Virtual Machines
  • VM virtual hardware, options and limits
  • Sizing and creating a new VM
  • Assigning, modifying and removing Virtual Hardware
  • Working with a VM’s BIOS
  • VMware remote console applications
  • Installing an OS into a VM
  • Driver installation and customization

• vCenter Server Appliance and Web Client
  • The need for Identity Source management
  • Installing an external Platform Service Controller
  • Installing and configuring vCenter Server Appliance
  • Connecting Single Sign On (SSO) to Active Directory and other identity sources
  • vCenter feature overview and components
  • Organizing vCenter’s inventory views
  • Importing ESXi hosts into vCenter management
  • Administering vCenter Server with Web Client

• VM Rapid Deployment using Templates, Clones
  • Templates – Virtual Machine Golden Master images
  • Creating, modifying, updating and working with templates
  • Patching, and refreshing templates
  • Cloning, one-time copies of VMs
  • Best practices for cloning and templating
  • Adding and resizing virtual disks
  • Hotplug VM virtual CPUs and Memory

• ESXi and vCenter Permission Model
  • VMware Security model
  • Configuring local users and groups
  • Managing local permissions
  • vCenter security model
  • Local, Domain and Active Directory users and groups
  • How permissions are applied

• Using Fibre and iSCSI Shared Storage
  • Fibre SAN overview
  • Identifying and using Fibre Host Bus Adapters
  • Scanning and rescanning Fibre and iSCSI SANs
  • iSCSI overview
  • Virtual and physical iSCSI adapters
  • Connecting to iSCSI storage
  • Performance and redundancy considerations and best practices
  • Understanding the benefits of VMware VAAI compliant storage

• Direct VM to SAN Access with Raw Device Maps
  • Explain Physical and Virtual Raw Device Maps (RDMs)
  • Use cases for Raw Device Maps
  • How Raw Device Maps work with VM cold, VMotion and Storage VMotion migrations
  • Using RDMs to implement Virtual and Virtual/Physical Microsoft Fail Over Clusters

• VMware File System (VMFS)
  • Unique file system properties of VMFS
  • Managing shared Volumes
  • Creating new VMFS partitions
  • Managing VMFS capacity with LUN spanning and LUN expansion
  • Native and 3rd party Multipathing with Fibre and iSCSI SANs
  • VMFS performance considerations
  • VMFS scalability and reliability

• Infrastructure Monitoring with vCenter Alarms
  • Alarm categories and definitions
  • Creating custom alarms and actions
  • Reviewing alarms and acknowledging them

• Resource Management and Resource Pools
  • How ESXi delivers resources to VMs
  • Shares, Reservations and Limits
  • CPU resource scheduling
  • Memory resource scheduling
  • Resource Pools

• VMotion Migration, Cold Migration, Storage VMotion
  • Cold Migrations to new ESXi hosts, datastores
  • Hot Migrations with VMotion
  • VMotion requirements and dependencies
  • How VMotion works – detailed explanation
  • Troubleshooting VMotion
  • Storage VMotion for hot VM disk migrations

• Distributed Resource Scheduling Clusters
  • Delegated resource management with Resource Pools
  • Resource balanced clusters with VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler
  • DRS Cluster configuration and tuning
  • Per-VM cluster policy overrides
  • Learn the features and benefits of DRS Power Management

• Failure Recovery with High Availability Clusters
  • High Availability options to minimize unplanned down time
  • VMware High Availability clusters
  • VMware Fault Tolerance

• Continuous VM Availability with Fault Tolerance
  • How Fault Tolerance provides continuous VM availability during ESXi host, storage network and SAN storage failures
  • How to configure ESXi hosts and networks to enable Fault Tolerance
  • How to configure, enable and monitor Fault Tolerance on VMs
  • Managing Fault Tolerance protected VMs
  • Fault Tolerance scalability, performance and limitations

• Disaster Preparedness with vSphere Replication
  • Explain vSphere Replication features and Use Cases
  • Import the vSphere Replication virtual appliance
  • Configure vSphere Replication including Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs)
  • Enable vSphere Replication on a VM
  • Recover a VM using vSphere Replication

• Patch Management with VMware Update Manager
  • Configure and enable VMware Update Manager
  • Establishing a patch baseline
  • Verifying compliance and patching ESXi hosts

• Managing Scalability and Performance
  • VMkernel CPU and memory resource management mechanisms
  • Tuning VM storage I/O performance
  • Identifying and resolving resource contention
  • Monitoring VM and ESXi host performance
  • Performance and capacity planning strategies

• Distributed Virtual Switches
  • Features and benefits of dvSwitches vs. Standard vSwitches
  • How to create a new dvSwitches
  • Role of dvUplink ports and dvSwitch Port Groups
  • Migrating physical NICs to dvSwitches
  • Migrating VMs and VMkernel ports to dvSwitches

• Final Thoughts
  • Consolidation guidelines for VMs and Storage
  • Determining which workloads to consolidate
  • Other considerations