VMware vSphere v6.5 Bootcamp
This powerful 5-day, 10 hour per day extended hours class is an intensive introduction to VMware vSphere™ including VMware ESXi™ 6.5 and vCenter™ 6.5. This course has been completely rewritten to reflect the most recent changes introduced in vSphere 6.5. Our courseware and labs have been fully updated and now use Host Client and Web Client rather than legacy vSphere Client for both presentation material and lab procedures.
Assuming no prior virtualization experience, this class starts with the basics and rapidly progresses to advanced topics. With 40+% of class time is devoted to labs, students learn the skills they need to become effective vSphere administrators.
Labs start with installation and configuration of stand-alone ESXi servers and progress to shared storage, networking and centralized management. The class continues to advanced topics including resource balancing, high availability, power management, back up and recovery, performance, vCenter redundancy, VM redundancy. Disaster preparedness, rapid deployment and VM cold, hot and storage migration.
This class is unique in its approach; which is to identify and eliminate common IT pain points using vSphere. Students learn how to deliver business value; not just the technical or mechanical aspects of the software.
By the end of the class, attendees will have the knowledge, skills, and best practices to design, implement, deploy, configure, monitor, manage and troubleshoot vSphere 6.5 installations.
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
Upgrade and use Host Client to manage stand alone 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 trade offs 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
This class is suitable for anyone who want to learn how to extract the maximum benefit from their investment in Virtual Infrastructure, including:
1. System architects or others who need to design virtual infrastructure
2. Security specialists responsible for administering, managing, securing Virtual Infrastructure
3. Operators responsible for day-to-day operation of Virtual Infrastructure
4. Performance analysts who need to understand, provision, monitor Virtual Infrastructure
5. Business Continuity specialists responsible for disaster recovery and high availability
6. Storage administrators who work with Fibre / iSCSI SAN volumes and NAS datastores
7. Managers who need an unbiased understanding of virtualization before committing their organization to a virtual infrastructure deployment
Detailed Chapter List:
Chapter 1 –
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
Chapter 2 – 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
Chapter 3 – 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
Chapter 3.1 – 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 using
Beaconing
How to enable and test Jumbo Frames
Chapter 4 – 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
Chapter 5 – 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
Chapter 6 – 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
Chapter 7 – 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
Chapter 8 – 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
Chapter 9 – 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
Chapter 9.1 – 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
Chapter 10 – 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
Chapter 11 –
Infrastructure Monitoring with vCenter Alarms
Alarm categories and definitions
Creating custom alarms and actions
Reviewing alarms and acknowledging them
Chapter 12 – Resource
Management and Resource Pools
How ESXi delivers resources to VMs
Shares, Reservations and Limits
CPU resource scheduling
Memory resource scheduling
Resource Pools
Chapter 13 – 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
Chapter 14 – 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
Chapter 15 – Failure
Recovery with High Availability Clusters
High Availability options to minimize unplanned down time
VMware High Availability clusters
VMware Fault Tolerance
Chapter 15.1 – 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
Chapter 16 – 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
Chapter 17 – Patch Management
with VMware Update Manager
Configure and enable VMware Update Manager
Establishing a patch baseline
Verifying compliance and patching ESXi hosts
Chapter 18 – 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
Chapter 19 – 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
Chapter 20 – Final
Thoughts
Consolidation guidelines for VMs and Storage
Determining which workloads to consolidate
Other considerations