VMware vSphere 8.0 Skill Up

An In-Depth VMware vSphere 8.0 Course for Experienced Administrator and Operators


Downloadable Outlines	VMware vSphere 8.0 Skill Up VMware vSphere 8.0 Skill Up
Format	5-day, 10hr/day instructor led training
Course Books	640pg Study Guide with all slides and slide notes 215pg Lab Guide with detailed instructions on how to complete 35+ lab tasks
Delivery Options	Instructor led on-site Instructor led Webinar Instructor led mixed on-site and webinar Self-paced video training with lab access and support
Max. Attendees	For the best attendee experience, we recommend no more than 16 students per class
Requirements	A Windows, Mac or Linux PC with a 1080p display A quality Internet connection A microphone, speakers and a web cam if you are attending remotely
vSphere Version	This class teaches vSphere 8.0
Remote Labs	Remote access to dedicated labs that include two ESXi hosts per student, an iSCSI SAN, DNS, DHCP, Active Directory, SMB shares, NFS shares, all media images and tools
Lab Time	45+% of class time is devoted to hands-on labs
Recorded Lectures	Lifetime access to recorded lectures and labs is included
Availability	Since February, 2024
Suggested Price	$3,599 USD / seat

Overview

This powerful, fast paced 5-day class provides in-depth training on VMware vSphere 8.0. This course is intended for vSphere professionals who want to take their knowledge and skills to the next level. In this course, we assume that you already have a basic understanding of virtualization and work experience as a vSphere VM owner, as an operator or as a junior administrator. This could be on earlier versions of vSphere or on vSphere 8.0.

This course is popular with people who need to upgrade their VMware vSphere 8.0 knowledge and skills. People who attend this class do so because they want to:

Go go deeper into vSphere features and capabilities
Learn vSphere best practices
Be able to diagnose vSphere issues
Troubleshoot and fix common problems
Upgrade vSphere 6.7 / 7.0 deployments to vSphere 8.0
Learn how to use Lifecycle Manager to upgrade VM virtual hardware and VMware Tools
Manage, review and configure ESXi hosts and vCenter from the command line
Dig deep into performance issues with ESXtop
Maximize scalability and performance while minimizing their spend on vSphere 8.0 subscription licenses
Learn how to upgrade vCenter 6.7 or 7.0 to version 8.0

The approach taken with this course is – Learn by doing as 45+% of class time is devoted to hands-on labs.

By the end of the class, attendees will have learned practical, actionable skills in vSphere design, implementation, upgrading, sizing, scalability, performance optimization and troubleshooting.

Now that Broadcom has completed its takeover of VMware is and VMware prices have increased substantially, it is even more important than ever for you to maximize your ROI on your existing vSphere installation. This class will help you achieve that goal.

Prerequisites

This is not a beginner level course. Attendees should have experience working with earlier versions of vSphere such as vSphere 5.x, 6.x or 7.0.

Chapter List

Our class consists of the following chapters:

Course Introduction
Install, Configure and Secure ESXi 8.0 (HoL¹)
Virtual and Physical Networking (HoL)
Advanced Virtual Networking (HoL)
Connecting to and Using NAS Shared Storage (HoL)
Virtual Hardware and Virtual Machines (HoL)
Upgrade and Configure vCenter Server Appliance (HoL)
Virtual Machine Rapid Deployment (HoL)
Upgrading ESXi Hosts with Lifecycle Manager (HoL)
Connecting ESXi to Shared Storage (HoL)
Direct VM to SAN Access with Raw Device Maps (HoL)
VMware File System (VMFS 6) (HoL)
Storage Load Balancing with SDRS Clusters (HoL)
VMotion Migration, Cold Migration, Storage Migration (HoL)
Distributed Resource Scheduling Clusters (HoL)
VMware High Availability Clusters (HoL)
VMware Fault Tolerance (HoL)
Distributed vSwitches Features and Scalability (HoL)
Final Thoughts

¹ HoL – Every attendee perform one or more Hands on Labs at the end of each chapter

Hands On Labs

Attendees will complete the following hands on labs during the class:

Connect to your dedicated Remote Lab environment
Install of ESXi 8.0 and perform post-install configuration steps
Review ESXi services and configure ESXi firewall
Enable ESXi Lockdown mode to prevent direct host configuration changes
Create/update Standard vSwitch configurations
Configure vSwitch Security Policies for Promiscuous Mode, MAC Address Changes and Forged Transmits
Configure vSwitches, VMkernel NICs for Jumbo Frame use
Configure and connect to NFS storage via GUI and CLI
Create a new VM according to best practices
Import and configure vCenter Server Appliance from the command line
Perform an upgrade of vCenter Server Appliance to v8.0
Use vCLI command line tools like esxcli, localcli, vmware-cmd and other commands to review, troubleshoot and configure your ESXi host
Use esxtop to monitor resource use and pinpoint performance concerns
Rapidly deploy VMs from Templates and Clones
Review and size VM vCPU to maximize CPU performance
Enable and use Hot-plug virtual hardware
Rapidly deploy VMs using Guest OS Customization Specifications
Monitor storage controller queue length and performance
Monitor ESXi host and VM memory use
Configure and use VMware Lifecycle Manager to update an ESXi host from ESXi 7.0 to ESXi 8.0
Use VMware Lifecycle Manager to upgrade a VM’s virtual hardware
Connect to an iSCSI SAN
Create a new VMFS 6.0 file systems
Create Storage DRS clusters and use Storage DRS to manage storage capacity and I/O load
Expand VMFS 6.0 file systems using LUN Spanning and LUN expansion
Create, configure and test vSphere High Availability Clusters
Configure All Paths Down and Permanent Device Loss policies in an HA cluster
Create a multi-core Fault Tolerant VM
Create and test a VMware DRS compute load balancing cluster
Create Distributed vSwitches
Bulk migrate VMs from Standard to Distributed vSwitch networking
Work with dvSwitch Configuration Backup Up and Restore
Enable and use dvSwitch Health Management
Using dvSwitch port shadowing
Testing network health on dvSwitches
Work with dvSwitch configuration roll back and recovery

Detailed Chapter List

Chapter 0 - Course Introduction

Welcome to this course
Course goals and objectives
VMware vSphere 8.0 certification road map

Chapter 1 – Install, Configure ESXi 8.0

Install and configure ESXi 8.0 using best practices
Enable and secure command line access including the console and Secure Shell
Using Lockdown mode to restrict management access
Working with ESXi log files
Working with VMkernel Paging Files on local storage, flash storage and shared storage
Use command line tools to review and update host configurations
Using command line tools to create/manage users and permissions

Chapter 2 – Introduction to Virtual and Physical Networking

Create / update standard Virtual Switches
Create, configure VMkernel NICs
Create, configure vSwitch Port Groups
Network bandwidth management using Traffic Shaping
Creating and updating pNIC teams
Enabling and configuring Cisco Discovery Protocol

Chapter 3 – Advanced Virtual Networking

Configuring vSwitch Security policies Promiscuous Mode, Forged Transmits and MAC Address Changes
Improve network failure detection and recovery with Beacon Probing
Configure and use Jumbo Frames to improve network performance
Use command line tools to create, update, configure and repair Standard vSwitches
Use esxtop to monitor network activity
The Five physical NIC teaming policies including the pros, cons and use cases for each one
Troubleshoot networking configuration and performance issues

Chapter 4 – Connecting to NAS Shared Storage

Connecting to NFS v3 storage
Network design for high service availability
Best practices for performance and reliability
NFS v4.1 features, benefits and use cases

Chapter 5 – Virtual Hardware and Virtual Machines

VM virtual hardware, options and maximums
Creating and right-sizing Virtual Machines for CPU, memory
Assigning, modifying and removing Virtual Hardware
Virtual Machine best practices
Import and export VMs in Open Virtual Machine Format
Configure and use vDisk flash based read caching to accelerate VM read performance

Chapter 6 – Upgrade and Configure vCenter Server Appliance

Deploy vCenter Server Appliance from the command line and configuration files
Upgrade vCenter Appliance to vCenter Appliance 8.0
vCenter redundancy with vCenter High Availability
Connecting Single Sign On (SSO) to Active Directory and other identity sources
Create and test a vCenter Appliance backup job

Chapter 7 – Virtual Machine Rapid Deployment

How to create a Template VM
Using Guest OS Customization for Windows, Linux and BSD UNIX
Enabling, using Hotplug Virtual CPU and memory
Enabling, using Hotplug disks, networking, USB devices and more
Predictive and adaptive sizing strategies for VMs
Troubleshooting Virtual Machine issues
Features, benefits and use cases of NVMe virtual disks
Use esxtop to analyze VM performance

Chapter 8 – Upgrading ESXi hosts with Lifecycle Manager

Configure VMware Lifecycle Manager
Create a custom ESXi 8.0 ISO image
Attaching a Host Upgrade baseline to a host and do a host upgrade pre-check
Upgrading an ESXi host from ESXi 7.0 to ESXi 8.0
Upgrading VM virtual hardware and VMware Tools using Lifecycle Manager
Using command line tools to backup and restore an ESXi host’s configuration

Chapter 9 – Connecting ESXi to Shared Block Mode Storage

General SAN features and capabilities
VMware APIs for Array Integration (VAAI)
Storage network design for performance and redundancy
Connecting to block mode shared storage
iSCSI Hardware and Software Initiators
iSCSI Static and Send Targets LUN discovery
Troubleshooting storage issues
Use esxtop to review storage controller and datastores configuration and I/O activity

Chapter 10 – Direct VM to SAN Access with Raw Device Maps

Explain Physical and Virtual Raw Device Maps (RDMs)
Use cases and benefits of Raw Device Maps
How Raw Device Maps work with VM cold, VMotion and Storage VMotion migrations
Using RDMs to implement Virtual and Virtual/Physical Windows Fail Over Clusters

Chapter 11 – VMFS – VMware's Cluster File System

Features and benefits of VMFS 6
Creating and managing shared Volumes
Managing VMFS capacity with LUN spanning, LUN expansion
Benefits, pros, cons and use cases for VMware’s three multipathing policies
Review storage queuing, I/O aborts and other storage issues
Diagnose and troubleshoot storage performance
Troubleshooting VMFS issues
VMFS best practices

Chapter 12 – Storage Load Balancing with SDRS Clusters

Creating and using Storage Distributed Resource Scheduling clusters (SDRS)
ter properties for capacity and I/O load balancing
Best practices for building storage clusters

Chapter 13 – VMotion Migration, Cold Migration, Storage VMotion

Cold Migrations to new ESXi hosts, datastores
Hot Migrations with VMotion
VMotion requirements and dependencies
Troubleshooting VMotion
Storage VMotion for hot VM disk migrations

Chapter 14 – 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

Chapter 15 – VMware High Availability Clusters

Minimize unplanned VM down time VMware High Availability clusters
VM requirements for HA Clusters
Storage fault recovery in High Availability clusters (All Paths Down, Permanent Device Loss)
Monitoring VM health in HA clusters
Admission Control policy settings for predictable pCPU/pRAM resource availability
Identifying and troubleshooting issues in VMware HA clusters

Chapter 16 – VMware Fault Tolerance

Eliminate VM unplanned down time with VMware Fault Tolerance
Role of the Primary and Secondary VM in a Fault Tolerance configuration
Explain how Fast Checkpointing keeps the Secondary VM vCPU, vRAM, vDisk up to date
Enabling VM Fault Tolerance
Initial VM synchronization
Testing Fault Tolerance

Chapter 17 – Distributed vSwitch Features and Scalability

Features and benefits of Distributed vSwitches
Role of the DVUplink port groupRole of the DVUplink port group
Adding ESXi hosts to dvSwitches
Creating dvSwitch port groups
Migrating physical NICs and VMkernel ports to dvSwitches
dvSwitch configuration backup and restore
Configuring custom VM MAC address generation policies
Testing dvSwitch network health

Chapter 18 – 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

For More Information

This class can be customized to meet your unique training and delivery needs, including:

On-site delivery at your facility
Custom timetables including 3-day rapid delivery boot-camps
Content and Lab customization to meed your unique training needs
Webinar distance training
Mentoring, implementation planning and assistance

For more information or to check pricing and availability, please contact your authorized ESXLab.com training partner or e-mail sales@esxlab.com