VMware vSphere 8.0 with ESXi and vCenter

A 5-day Introductory Course on VMware vSphere 8.0


Downloadable Outlines	VMware vSphere 8.0 with ESXi and vCenter VMware vSphere 8.0 with ESXi and vCenter
Format	5-day, 8hr/day instructor led training
Course Books	640pg Study Guide with all slides and slide notes 220pg Lab Guide with detailed instructions on how to complete 39+ 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
Lab Time	45+% of class time is devoted to hands-on labs
Recorded Lectures	Lifetime access to recorded lectures and labs is included
Suggested Price	$3,595 USD / seat

Overview

This powerful 5-day class is an intensive introduction to VMware vSphere™ 8.0 including VMware ESXi™ 8.0 and vCenter™ 8.0. This course has been completely updated to reflect the most recent changes introduced in vSphere 8.0.

Assuming no prior virtualization experience, this class starts with the basics and rapidly progresses to advanced topics. 45+% of class time is devoted to labs so students get the skills they need to become effective vSphere administrators.

Students use dedicated labs that start with installation and configuration of stand-alone ESXi hosts and progress through shared storage, networking, building VMs and centralized management. The class continues with rapid VM deployment, hot-plug virtual hardware, permissions, alarms resource management, VM high availability clusters, VM load balanced clusters, VM cold, hot and storage migration, updating / upgrading ESXi hosts and performance.

This class is unique in that, by the end of the class, students will have built a complete vSphere 8.0 environment from scratch inclulding installing and configuring ESXi 8.0 hosts and installing and configuring vCenter Server Appliance 8.0. We are the only major vSphere training provider where every student must install ESXi and vCenter to be successful.

By the end of the class, attendees will have acquired the knowledge, skills, and best practices needed to deploy, configure and administer VMware vSphere 8.0.

Objectives

At the end of the course, attendees will be able to:

Explain the many significant benefits of virtualization
Install ESXi 8.0 according to best practices
Use Host Client to manage standalone ESXi hosts
Configure and manage local storage resources
Create virtual and virtual to physical network configurations
Define and use file share (NAS / NFS) datastores
Create and customize virtual machines
Install, configure and upgrade VMware Tools
Install, configure and administer vCenter Server Appliance
Perform rapid VM deployments using VM Clones and Templates
Use Guest OS customization to rapidly and consistently configure new VMs
Configure and use hotplug virtual hardware to add VM hardware with zero downtime
Add and grow VM virtual disks including system disks and secondary volumes
Manually upgrade VM virtual hardware
Use Permissions to enable and customize user and group access to vSphere
Configure ESXi to connect to shared storage resources
Create VMFS datastores
Grow VMFS datastore capacity with LUN Spans and by Extending VMFS volumes and file systems
Explain and use VMware’s three different multipathing policies – Round Robin, Fixed and MRU
Use vCenter alarms to monitor ESXi, VM, storage and network health, performance, state
Use Resource Pools to bulk delegate compute resource to VMs and child Resource Pools
Perform VM cold migrations, hot VMotion migrations and hot Storage VMotion migrations
Create VM Load Balanced DRS Clusters to dynamically balance VMs to Hosts to ensure compute resource availability
Minimize unplanned VM down time with VMware High Availability clusters
Update and Upgrade ESXi hosts using VMware Lifecycle Manager
Use VMware Lifecycle Manager to upgrade VMware Tools and Virtual Hardware in VMs
Monitor and tune both ESXi and virtual machine for best performance
Troubleshoot common problems
Use Best Practices to build a reliable, scalable and highly available vSphere environment

Attendee Prerequisites

Attendees should have user, operator or administrator experience on common operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, Linux™, Mac OS/X, etc. Experience installing, configuring and managing operating systems, storage and / or networks is helpful but not required. We assume that all attendees have a basic familiarity with PC server hardware, disk partitioning, IP addressing, O/S installation, networking, etc.

Who Should Attend

This class is suitable for anyone who want to learn how to obtain the maximum benefit from their investment in VMware vSphere Virtual Infrastructure, including:

System architects or others who need to understand / design virtual infrastructure
Security specialists responsible for administering, managing, securing virtual infrastructure
Operators responsible for day-to-day operation of virtual infrastructure
Performance analysts who need to understand, provision, monitor vrtual infrastructure
Business Continuity specialists responsible for disaster recovery and high availability
Storage administrators who work with Fibre / iSCSI SAN volumes and NAS datastores
Managers who need an unbiased understanding of virtualization before committing their organization to a virtual infrastructure deployment

Chapter List

Our class consists of the following chapters:

Course introduction
Introduction to VMware vSphere 8.0
How to Install, Configure ESXi 8.0 (HoL¹)
Virtual and Physical Networking (HoL)
Connecting to and Using NAS Shared Storage (HoL)
Virtual Hardware and Virtual Machines (HoL)
vCenter Server Appliance (HoL)
VM Rapid Deployment using Templates, Clones (HoL)
VM Hotplug Virtual Hardware (HoL)
Working with Shared Storage (HoL)
VMware File System (VMFS) (HoL)
ESXi and vCenter Permission Model (HoL)
Infrastructure Monitoring with vCenter Alarms (HoL)
Resource Management with Resource Pools (HoL)
VMotion Migration, Cold Migration, Storage (HoL)
Distributed Resource Scheduling Clusters (HoL)
VM Failure Recovery with High Availability Clusters (HoL)
VMware Lifecycle Manager (HoL)
Managing Scalability and Performance (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 ESXi 8.0, and perform post-install configurations
Create, update Standard vSwitches. Use pNIC Teams for performance and redundancy
Define, connect to and browse NFS based datastores
Create a Virtual Machine and install a guest OS into the VM
Install VMware Tools into a VM. Add 3rd party tools and utilities into a VM
Export a VM in Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) and then re-import it back into ESXi
Install and configure the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA)
Configure vCSA Single Sign On (SSO) identity sources including Active Directory
Configure vCenter's inventory views to organize inventory objects
Import ESXi hosts into vCenter management
Work with VM Clones and Templates. Convert a VM into a template
Rapidly deploy new VMs from template
Perform ad-hoc VMs rapid deployments using VM cloning
Rapidly deploy VMs using Guest OS Customization Specifications
Work with hot-add virtual hardware
Hot add, and then grow, a secondary virtual disk
Grow a Windows system disk and partition with no downtime
Configure and test hotplug memory
Hotplug a new virtual CPU package into a running VM
Configure the Software iSCSI adapter. Scan for and review SAN based storage volumes
VMware VMFS 6 – VMware's cluster file system
Grow VMFS volumes using LUN Spans. Growing volumes and their VMFS datastores
Review and update VMFS properties including Space Reclaim
Review and select the best VMFS multipath policy for optimal performance and reliability
Work with vCenter permissions using stock and custom Roles
Configure vCenter alarms to monitor select infrastructure objects
Configure Alarm actions to Send SNMP traps to a trap receiver on high VM compute resource use
Create and tune Resource Pools. Test Resource Pool compute resource delegations
Cold Migrate VMs from one ESXi host and storage volume to another
Hot VMotion migrate the running compute state of a VM from one ESXi host to another
Hot Storage migrate the running disk state of a VM from one datastore to another
Build and test an automated compute resource load balancing DRS cluster
Create and configure a VMware High Availability cluster
Manually fail a host and watch the cluster place and restart impacted VMs onto healthy hosts
Set up VMware Lifecycle Manager to update/update ESXi hosts
Perform an ESXi host Compliance Scan, review host non-compliance
Use VLM to automatically upgrade an ESXi 7.0 host to ESXi 8.0
Use VLM to upgrade a VM’s virtual hardware to ESXi 8.0 compatibility

Detailed Chapter List

Chapter 0 - Course Introduction

vSphere 8.0 overview
Brief overview of the course and labs

Chapter 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

Chapter 2 – How to Install, Configure ESXi 8.0

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

Chapter 3 – Introduction to Virtual and Physical 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

Chapter 4 – Connecting to NAS / NFS Shared Storage

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

Chapter 5 – Virtual Hardware and 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

Chapter 6 – vCenter Server Appliance

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

Chapter 7 – VM Rapid Deployment using Templates, 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

Chapter 8 - Working with VM Hot Plug Virtual 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

Chapter 9 – Working with 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

Chapter 10 – VMFS – VMware's Cluster File System

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

Chapter 11 – The ESXi and vCenter Permission Model

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

Chapter 12 – Virtual Infrastructure Monitoring with vCenter 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

Chapter 13 – Compute Resource Management with 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

Chapter 14 – VMotion Migration, Cold Migration, Storage VMotion

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

Chapter 15 – Distributed Resource Scheduling Load Balanced 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 16 – Rapid VM Failure Recovery with 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

Chapter 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

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 ESX host performance
Performance and capacity planning strategies

Chapter 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

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