This five-day, intensive course takes you from introductory to advanced VMware vSphere® 7 management skills. Building on the installation and configuration content from our best-selling course, you will also develop advanced skills needed to manage and maintain a highly available and scalable virtual infrastructure. Through a mix of lecture and hands-on labs, you will install, configure and manage vSphere 7. You will explore the features that build a foundation for a truly scalable infrastructure and discuss when and where these features have the greatest effect. This course prepares you to administer a vSphere infrastructure for an organization of any size using vSphere 7, which includes VMware ESXi™ 7 and VMware vCenter Server® 7.

Course objectives

• Describe the software-defined data center (SDDC)
• Explain the vSphere components and their function in the infrastructure
• Describe the benefits and capabilities of VMware Skyline
• 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 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

Target audience

• System administrators
• System engineers

Prerequisites

This course has the following prerequisites:
System administration experience on Microsoft Windows or Linux operating systems

Outline

Module 1: Course Introduction

• Introductions and course logistics
• Course objectives

Module 2: Introduction to vSphere and the Software-Defined
Data Center

• Explain basic virtualization concepts
• Describe how vSphere fits into the softwaredefined 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
• Describe the ESXi host architecture
• Navigate the Direct Console User Interface (DCUI)
to configure an ESXi host
• Recognize ESXi host user account best practices
• Install an ESXi host
• Use VMware Host Client™ to configure ESXi host
settings
• Describe how to proactively manage your vSphere
environment using VMware Skyline

Module 3: Virtual Machines

• Create and provision a virtual machine
• Explain the importance of VMware Tools™
• Install VMware Tools
• Identify the files that make up a VM
• Recognize the components of a VM
• Recognize virtual devices supported by a VM
• Describe the benefits and use cases for containers
• Identify the parts of a container system

Module 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

Module 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

Module 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
• Recognize the components of a VMware vSAN™
configuration

Module 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
• Use customization specification files to customize a
new virtual machine
• Perform vSphere vMotion and vSphere Storage
vMotion migrations
• Describe Enhanced vMotion Compatibility
• Create and manage virtual machine snapshots
• Examine the features and functions of VMware
vSphere® Replication™
• Describe the benefits of vSphere Storage APIs –
Data Protection