By the end of the course, you should be able to meet the following objectives:

• Describe the software-defined data center (SDDC)

• Explain the vSphere components and their function in the infrastructure

• Install and configure VMware ESXi™ hosts

• Deploy and configure VMware vCenter® Server Appliance™

• Use VMware vSphere® Client™ to manage the vCenter Server inventory and the vCenter Server configuration

• Manage, monitor, back up, and protect vCenter Server Appliance

• Create virtual networks with vSphere standard switches

• Describe the storage technologies supported by vSphere

• Configure virtual storage using iSCSI and NFS storage

• Create and manage VMware vSphere® VMFS datastores

• Use the vSphere Client to create virtual machines, templates, clones, and snapshots

• Create a content library and deploy virtual machines from templates in the library

• Manage virtual machine resource use and manage resource pools

• Migrate virtual machines with VMware vSphere® vMotion® and VMware vSphere® Storage vMotion®

• Create and manage a vSphere cluster that is enabled with VMware vSphere

® High Availability and VMware vSphere® Distributed Resource Scheduler™• Create virtual networks with VMware vSphere

® Distributed Switch™ and enable distributed switch features• Discuss solutions for managing the vSphere life cycle

• Use VMware vSphere

® Lifecycle Manager™ to apply patches and perform upgrades to ESXi hosts and virtual machines• Use host profiles to manage ESXi configuration compliance

• Describe how vSphere storage APIs help storage systems integrate with vSphere

• Configure and use virtual machine storage policies

• Discuss the purpose and capabilities of VMware vSphere® with Kubernetes and how it fits into the VMware Tanzu™ portfolio

• System administrators

• System engineers

This course has the following prerequisites:

• System administration experience on Microsoft Windows or Linux operating systems

1 Course Introduction

• • Introductions and course logistics
• • Course objectives

2 Introduction to vSphere and the Software-Defined Data Center

• • Explain basic virtualization concepts
• • Describe how vSphere fits into the software-defined data center and the cloud infrastructure
• • Explain how vSphere interacts with CPUs, memory, networks, and storage
• • Recognize the user interfaces for accessing the vCenter Server system and ESXi hosts
• • Use VMware Host Client™ to access and manage ESXi host

3 Virtual Machines

• • Create and remove a virtual machine
• • Provision a virtual machine with virtual devices
• • Identify the files that make up a virtual machine
• • Explain the importance of VMware Tools™

4 vCenter Server

• • Describe the vCenter Server architecture
• • Discuss how ESXi hosts communicate with vCenter Server
• • Deploy and configure vCenter Server Appliance
• • Use the vSphere Client to manage the vCenter Server inventory
• • Add data center, organizational objects, and hosts to vCenter Server
• • Use roles and permissions to enable users to access objects in the vCenter Server inventory
• • Back up vCenter Server Appliance
• • Monitor vCenter Server tasks, events, and appliance health
• • Use vCenter Server High Availability to protect a vCenter Server Appliance

5 Configuring and Managing Virtual Networks

• • Create and manage standard switches
• • Describe the virtual switch connection types
• • Configure virtual switch security, traffic-shaping and load-balancing policies
• • Compare vSphere distributed switches and standard switches

6 Configuring and Managing Virtual Storage

• • Identify storage protocols and storage device types
• • Discuss ESXi hosts using iSCSI, NFS, and Fibre Channel storage
• • Create and manage VMFS and NFS datastores
• • Explain how multipathing works with iSCSI, NFS, and Fibre Channel storage
• • Deploy virtual machines on a VMware vSAN™ datastore

7 Virtual Machine Management

• • Use templates and cloning to deploy new virtual machines
• • Modify and manage virtual machines
• • Create a content library and deploy virtual machines from templates in the library
• • Dynamically increase the size of a virtual disk
• • Use customization specification files to customize a new virtual machine
• • Perform vSphere vMotion and vSphere Storage vMotion migrations
• • Create and manage virtual machine snapshots
• • Examine the features and functions of VMware vSphere® Replication™

8 Resource Management and Monitoring

• • Discuss CPU and memory concepts in a virtualized environment
• • Describe what overcommitment of a resource means
• • Describe methods for optimizing CPU and memory usage
• • Use various tools to monitor resource use
• • Create and use alarms to report certain conditions or events

9 vSphere Clusters

• • Describe options for making a vSphere environment highly available
• • Explain the vSphere HA architecture
• • Configure and manage a vSphere HA cluster
• • Examine the features and functions of VMware vSphere® Fault Tolerance
• • Configure a vSphere cluster using ESXi Cluster Quickstart
• • Describe the functions of a vSphere DRS cluster
• • Create a vSphere DRS cluster

10 Network Scalability

• • Configure and manage vSphere distributed switches
• • Describe how VMware vSphere® Network I/O Control enhances performance
• • Explain distributed switch features such as port mirroring and NetFlow

11 vSphere Lifecycle Management

• • Describe how VMware vSphere® Lifecycle Manager™ works
• • Use vSphere Lifecycle Manager to update ESXi hosts in a cluster

12 Host and Management Scalability

• • Use host profiles to manage ESXi configuration compliance
• • Create and manage resource pools in a cluster

13 Storage Scalability

• • Explain why VMware vSphere® VMFS is a high-performance, scalable file system
• • Explain VMware vSphere® Storage APIs – Array Integration, VMware vSphere® API for Storage Awareness™, and vSphere APIs for I/O Filtering
• • Configure and assign virtual machine storage policies
• • Create VMware vSAN™ storage policies
• • Configure VMware vSphere® Storage DRS™ and VMware vSphere® Storage I/O Control
• • Discuss vSphere support for NVMe and iSER

14 Introduction to vSphere with Kubernetes

• • Differentiate between containers and virtual machines
• • Identify the parts of a container system
• • Recognize the basic architecture of Kubernetes
• • Describe a basic Kubernetes workflow
• • Describe the purpose of vSphere with Kubernetes and how it fits into the VMware Tanzu portfolio
• • Explain the vSphere with Kubernetes supervisor cluster
• • Describe the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid service