User Story Workshop
Course No. N/A
VMware vSphere 5.1 with ESXi and vCenter
Course Number:
N/A
Audience:
This class is suitable for anyone who want to learn how to extract the maximum benefit from their investment in Virtual Infrastructure.
Course Duration:
5 days
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 and 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.
Course Objectives:
At the end of the course, attendees will be able to:
- Explain the many significant benefits of virtualization
- Install ESXi Server according to best practices
- Configure and manage local storage
- Create virtual, distributed virtual, and virtual to physical LAN segments
- Understand and use shared SAN storage including Fibre SAN, iSCSI SAN
- Define and use file share (NAS) datastores
- Install, configure Single Sign On services
- Install, configure and administer VMware vCenter
- Create virtual machines, install operating systems and applications
- Rapidly deployment of VMs using golden-master templates
- Create clones – one-time copies of virtual machine
- Perform VM cold migrations, hot migrations and Storage VMotion
- Configure, manage, monitor and secure users and groups
- Understand the benefits and trade offs of network, SAN,
- Deploy and use VMware Data Recovery to back up and recover VMs
- Create and manage load balanced clusters
- Understand, create and manage high availability clusters to protect against VM service loss caused by ESXi server failures
- Monitor and tune both ESXi and virtual machine performance
- Patch and update ESXi servers using vCenter Update Manager
- Understand how VMware and third party products, including operating systems, are impacted by virtualization
- Troubleshoot common problems
Course Outline:
*HoL – Indicated students perform a hands-on at the end of the chapter
- 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
- How to Install, Configure ESXi 5.1 Installable (HoL[1])
- Understanding ESXi
- Selecting, validating and preparing your server
- Storage controllers, disks and partitions
- Software installation and best practices
- Joining ESXi to a Domain
- First look at the VMware vSphere Client
- Virtual and Physical Networking (HoL)
- vNetwork standard and distributed virtual Switches
- Virtual Switches, Ports and Port Groups
- Creating VMkernel ports
- Creating, sizing and customizing Virtual Switches
- NAS Shared Storage (HoL)
- Benefits Shared Storage offer to Virtual Infrastructure
- Shared Storage options
- NFS Overview
- Configuring ESX to use NFS Shares
- Troubleshooting NFS connections
- Virtual Hardware and Virtual Machines (HoL)
- 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
- Identity Sources and Single Sign On (HoL)
- The need for Identity Source management
- Installing and configuring Single Sign On (SSO)
- Connecting to Active Directory and other identity sources
- vCenter Server and the Next Generation Client (HoL)
- vCenter feature overview and components
- VMware Licensing
- Registering vCenter with SSO
- Organizing vCenter’s inventory views
- Importing ESX hosts into vCenter management
- Installing and Using the vSphere Next Generation vSphere Client (NGC)
- VM Rapid Deployment w. Templates, Clones (HoL)
- 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
- ESXi and vCenter Permission Model (HoL)
- 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 (HoL)
- Fibre SAN overview
- Identifying and using Fibre Host Bus Adapters
- Scanning and Rescanning Fibre SANs
- iSCSI overview
- Virtual and physical iSCSI adapters
- Connecting to iSCSI storage
- Scanning and rescanning iSCSI SANS
- Performance and redundancy considerations and best practices
- VMFS – The VMware File System (HoL)
- 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
- Resource Management and Resource Pools (HoL)
- How ESX delivers resources to VMs
- Shares, Reservations and Limits
- CPU resource scheduling
- Memory resource scheduling
- Resource Pools
- ESX and vCenter Alarms (HoL)
- Alarm categories and definitions
- Creating custom alarms and actions
- Reviewing alarms and acknowledging them
- Host Profiles (HoL)
- Using Host Profiles to capture an ESXi host configuration
- Perform configuration compliance scans
- Remediating out of compliance configuration issues
- Rapid ESXi host deployment/configuration with Host Profiles
- Consolidation with vCenter Converter (HoL)
- vCenter Converter overview
- Converting physical machines, virtual machines and OS Images
- Cold migrations of physical machines to virtual machines
- Hot migrations of physical machines to virtual machines
- VM Back Up, Recovery with Data Recovery (HoL)
- Pro’s and Con’s of traditional back up strategies
- Backing up VMs with VMware Data Recovery
- Backing and restoring your ESXi server configuration
- Third party VM back up solutions
- VM Hot and Cold Migration, Storage VMotion (HoL)
- Cold Migrations to new ESX hosts, datastores
- Hot Migrations with VMotion
- VMotion requirements and dependencies
- How VMotion works – detailed explanation
- Troubleshooting VMotion
- Storage VMotion for hot VM disk migrations
- Load Balancing with DRS Clusters (HoL)
- Delegated resource management with Resource Pools
- Resource balanced clusters with VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler
- DRS Cluster configuration and tuning
- Per-VM cluster policy overrides
- Rapid VM Recovery with HA Clusters (HoL)
- High Availability options to minimize unplanned down time
- VMware High Availability clusters
- VMware Fault Tolerance
- Patching ESXi hosts with Update Manager (HoL)
- Configure and enable VMware Update Manager
- Establishing a patch baseline
- Verifying compliance and patching ESXi hosts
- Managing Scalability and Performance (HoL)
- VMkernel CPU and memory resource management mechanisms
- Tuning VM storage I/O performance
- Identifying and resolving resource contention
- Monitoring VM and ESX host performance
- Performance and capacity planning strategies
- Final Thoughts
- Consolidation guidelines for VMs and Storage
- Determining which workloads to consolidate
- Other considerations
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