VMware vSphere 8.0 with ESXi and vCenter (VM7431)

Module 1: Virtualization Infrastructure Overview

• Virtualization explained
• How virtualization solves common issues with workload management
• Overview of VMware vSphere software components and features
• What's New in vSphere 8.0

Module 2: Stand Alone ESXi

• Understanding ESXi
• Selecting, validating and preparing your server
• Software installation and best practices
• Join ESXi to a Domain
• Local User Management and Policies
• Managing ESXi hosts with Host Client

Module 3: Networking

• vNetwork standard virtual Switches
• Virtual Switches, Ports and Port Groups
• Creating and configuring VMkernel NICs for ESXi networking
• vSwitch pNIC teaming for performance and reliability

Module 4: NAS Storage

• Shared Storage benefits
• NFS Overview
• Configuring ESXi to use NFS shares
• NFS Use Cases
• Troubleshooting NFS common problems

Module 5: Virtual Machines

• VM virtual hardware, options and maximums
• Sizing and creating a new VM
• Assigning, modifying and removing Virtual Hardware
• VMware remote console applications
• Installing an OS into a VM
• Saving and restoring a VM’s state with snapshots

Module 6: vCenter

• vCenter overview and components
• Installing and configuring vCenter Server Appliance
• Complete post-install configuration tasks using vCSA’s VAMI interface
• Connecting vCenter’s base Linux Photon OS to Active Directory
• Updating Single Sign On’s directory source database to query Active Directory
• Organizing vCenter's inventory views
• Importing ESX hosts into vCenter management
• Administering vCenter Server with HTML 5 based vSphere Client

Module 7: Templates and Clones

• Virtual Machine Golden Master rapid deployment using templates
• Creating, updating and working with Templates
• Rapid ad-hoc VM duplication using Cloning
• Best practices for cloning and templating

Module 8: Hot Plug Hardware

• Update VM vHardware with no downtime with hotplug virtual hardware
• Configuring VMs to support hotplug vCPUs and vRAM
• Hot-plugging vNICs and vDisks into a running VM
• Windows Guest OS experience when hot-pluging virtual hardware

Module 9: Permissions

• VMware Security model
• Configuring local users and groups
• Managing local permissions
• Granting access to local and Active Directory based users and groups
• How permissions are applied

Module 10: Shared Storage

• Fibre SAN overview
• World Wide Names and LUN identifiers
• Fibre Soft Zoning and Hard Zoning
• iSCSI overview
• Virtual and physical iSCSI adapters
• Configuring ESXi’s iSCSI software adaptor
• Scanning and rescanning iSCSI volumes
• Performance and redundancy considerations and best practices
• Storage and storage network design and best practices
• Understanding the benefits of VMware VAAI compliant storage

Module 11: VMFS

• VMFS 6 features and benefits
• Creating new VMFS datastores
• Managing VMFS capacity with LUN spanning and LUN expansion
• Native and 3rd party Multipathing including policies, benefits and use cases
• VMFS performance, design and configuration tips

Module 12: Alarms

• Alarm categories and definitions
• Creating custom alarms and setting alarm actions
• Configure vCenter so it can send E-mail and SNMP alerts
• Reviewing existing alarms and acknowledging them
• Identify the most useful alarms to review and enable

Module 13: Resource Pools

• Delegate compute resources in bulk using Resource Pools
• How ESXi delivers resources to VMs
• Compute resource tunes - Shares, Reservations and Limits
• Configure and test predictable compute resource delegations

Module 14: VM Migration

• Cold Migrations to new ESX hosts, datastores
• Hot VM compute state migrations between ESXi hosts with VMotion
• VMotion requirements and dependencies
• How VMotion works – detailed explanation
• How to test ESXi hosts and VMs for VMotion compatibility
• Hot VM disk state migrations between datastores with Storage VMotion

Module 15: Distributed Resource Scheduling Clusters

• Automatic CPU and Memory resource balancing clusters with VMware DRS
• DRS Cluster configuration and tuning
• Per-VM cluster policy overrides
• Features, benefits and use cases for Enhanced VMotion Compatibility (EVC)
• Configuring Per-VM EVC

Module 16: High Availability Clusters

• High Availability options to minimize unplanned VM down time due to infrastructure issues
• VMware HA policies to protect against ESXi host, storage network and SAN volume failures
• Admission Control for guaranteed compute resource availability after a host failure
• Heartbeat Datastores to quickly resolve host isolation vs. host failure situations

Module 17: VMware Lifecycle Manager

• Configure and enable VMware Lifecycle Manager
• Create an ESXi host upgrade baseline
• Checking ESXi host compliance with attached host upgrade baselines
• How to upgrade ESXi 7.0 hosts to ESXi 8.0 using VLM

Module 18: Performance

• 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

Module 19: Final Thoughts

• What to virtualize and what not to virtualize
• VM guest OS security in a virtual environment
• How to protect VMs and their data from unauthorized copying
• Useful books, white papers and online resources