VMware vSphere 6.7 Optimize, Upgrade, Troubleshoot
Course Name	VMware vSphere 6.7 Optimize, Upgrade, Troubleshoot VMware vSphere 6.7 Optimize, Upgrade, Troubleshoot VMware vSphere 6.7 Optimize, Upgrade, Troubleshoot
Format	5-day, 8 hour/day instructor led training
Course Books	750+ pg Study Guide fully annotated with slide notes 275+ pg Lab Guide with detailed steps for completing all labs
vSphere Version	Covers VMware vSphere 6.7 Update 1 including ESXi 6.7, vCenter 6.7U1 and related products
Delivery Options	Instructor Led On-site. Instructor Led Distance. Instructor Led Mixed On-Site & Remote. Self paced video training with full lab access and instructor mentoring
Remote Labs	Remote access to dedicated labs with two ESXi hosts per student, an iSCSI SAN, DNS DHCP, Active Directory, SMB shares, NFS shares, all media images and tools
Max Attendees	Limited by server availability. We currently have capacity for 200+ concurrent student sessions in our remote lab environment
Requirements	Course can be run from any location that has a reliable Internet connection. Each attendee needs a PC that supports Microsoft Terminal Services
Lab Time	45+% of class time is devoted to hands-on labs
Availability	Released April, 2019
Recorded Lectures	Attendees of full instructor led classes receive lifetime access video recordings of all lectures
Suggested Price	$3,595 USD / seat

Overview

This powerful 5-day class provides an in-depth look at vSphere 6.7. In this course, cover how to deploy vSphere 6.7, how to optimize it – including VMs, ESXi hosts, vCenter Server Appliance, networking and shared SAN storage… with the goal of delivering both scalability and performance.

We show step-by-step how to upgrade or migrate to vCenter Server Appliance 6.7, how to use VMware Update Manager to upgrade ESXi hosts and how to use VUM how to upgrade VM virtual hardware.

And, we will also show you how to diagnose, isolate and fix common problems. All of vSphere Client, Host Client, Web Client and command line tools are all used to explore, configure, update, investigate and zero in on performance bottlenecks and trouble spots. Up to 45% of class time is devoted to labs so concepts, skills and best practices are developed and reinforced.

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

Prerequisites

This is not a beginner level course. Attendees should have experience installing and configuring and administering vSphere 5.x or 6.x components including ESXi, vCenter server or vCenter Server Appliance.

Who Should Attend

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

System architects or others who need to design virtual infrastructure
Security specialists responsible for administering, managing, securing Virtual Infrastructure
Performance analysts who need to understand, provision, monitor Virtual 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 19 chapters:

Chapter 1 – Install, Configure and Secure ESXi 6.7 (Ho^L1)
Chapter 2 – Virtual and Physical Networking (HoL¹)
Chapter 3 – Advanced Virtual Networking (HoL¹)
Chapter 4 – Connecting to NAS Shared storage (HoL¹)
Chapter 5 – Virtual Hardware and Virtual Machines (HoL¹)
Chapter 6 – vCenter Server Appliance Upgrade and Configure (HoL¹)
Chapter 7 – Virtual Machine Rapid Deployment (HoL¹)
Chapter 8 – Upgrade ESXi hosts, VMs with VMware Update Manager (HoL¹)
Chapter 9 – Connecting to Fibre & iSCSI Shared Storage (HoL¹)
Chapter 10 – Understand and Use Raw Device Maps (HoL¹)
Chapter 11 – Working with VMFS Filesystems (HoL¹)
Chapter 12 – Storage Profiles (HoL¹)
Chapter 13 – Storage Load Balancing with SDRS Clusters (HoL¹)
Chapter 14 – VM VMotion, Storage VMotion Migration (HoL¹)
Chapter 15 – HA Cluster CPU/Memory Resource Mgt. (HoL¹)
Chapter 16 – VMware Fault Tolerance (HoL¹)
Chapter 17 – Distributed vSwitch Features and Scalability (HoL¹)

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:

Install of ESXi 6.7 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 a vSwitch, VMkernel ports for Jumbo Frame use
Connect to NFS storage
Create a new VM according to best practices
Update VMs for service by pCPU cores (not hyperthreaded logical processors)
Import and configure vCenter Server Appliance 6.0 via command line
Perform an upgrade of vCenter Server Appliance from v6.0 to v6.7
Import and configure VMware Management Assistant
Use vCLI command line tools like vifptarget, esxcli, localcli, vmware-cmd and other commands
Use ESXtop to monitor resource use and pinpoint performance concerns
Rapidly deploy VMs from Templates and Clones
Tune VM vCPU to maximize CPU performance
Enable and use Hot-plug virtual hardware
Monitor storage controller queue length and performance
Monitor ESXi host and VM memory use
Configure and use VMware Update Manager to update an ESXi host from ESXi 6.0 to ESXi 6.7
Use VMware Update Manager to upgrade a VM’s virtual hardware
Connect to an iSCSI SAN
Create VMFS file systems
Expand VMFS using LUN Spanning and LUN expansion
Create custom storage profiles and assign them to VMFS volumes
Assign storage profiles to VMs
Perform storage compliance checks and remediate non-compliant VMs
Create Storage DRS clusters and use Storage DRS to manage storage capacity and I/O load
Create a High Availability Cluster
Configure All Paths Down and Permanent Device Loss policies in an HA cluster
Create a multi-core Fault Tolerant VM
Create Distributed vSwitches
Bulk migrate VMs from Standard to Distributed vSwitches
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 1 – Install, Configure and Secure ESXi 6.7

Install and configure ESXi 6.7 Update 1 using Best Practices
Enable and secure command line access including the console and Secure Shell
Using Lockdown mode to restrict management access
Lockdown modes introduced in vSphere 6.7
Configure vFlash storage on ESXi
Using command line tools to review and update host configurations
Use command line tools to create/manage users and permissions

Chapter 2 – Virtual and Physical Networking

Create / update standard Virtual Switches
vSwitch security policies
Network failure detection and beaconing
Enabling Discovery Protocol settings
Use command line tools to configure/update vSwitches
Use Jumbo Frames to improve network performance
Use esxtop to monitor network activity

Chapter 3 – Advanced Networking

Configuring vSwitch Security policies, Promiscuous Mode, Forged Transmits and MAC address changes
Understanding and using Traffic Shaping
The Five physical NIC teaming policies including their pros / cons and use cases
Enabling and using Jumbo Frames for improved performance and reduced protocol overhead
Troubleshoot networking configuration and performance issues

Chapter 4 – Connecting to and Using NAS Shared Storage

Connecting to NFS v3 storage
Network design for high service availability
Best practices for performance and reliability

Chapter 5 – Virtual Hardware and Virtual Machines

VM virtual hardware, options and limits
Creating and right-sizing Virtual Machines for CPU, memory
Installing VMware Tools
Virtual Machine best practices
Import and export VMs in Open Virtual Machine Format
Implement and use vFlash Read Cache storage to accelerate VM read performance
Configure and use virtual NVMe vDisks

Chapter 6 – Upgrade, Configure vCenter Server Appliance

Deploy vCenter Server Appliance 6.0 via the command line and configuration files
Upgrade vCenter Appliance 6.0 to vCenter Appliance 6.7
vCenter deployment and redundancy options
Connecting Single Sign On (SSO) to Active Directory and other identity sources
Use command line tools to backup and restore an ESXi host’s configuration

Chapter 7 – VM Rapid Deployment using Templates, Clones

How to create a Template VM
Using Guest OS Customization for Windows and non-Windows OS'
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
Use esxtop to analyze a VM's performance

Chapter 8 – Use VMware Update Manager to Upgrade ESXi hosts

Using command line tools to backup and restore an ESXi host’s configuration
Configure VMware Update Managers
Create ESXi host Patch Baselines
Importing a new ESXi install media image
Attaching a Host Upgrade patch baseline
Performing host compliance scans
Upgrading an ESXi host from ESXi 6.0 to ESXi 6.7

Chapter 9 – Connecting to Fibre & iSCSI Shared Storage

General SAN features and capabilities
Overview of Fibre Storage Networks
VMware APIs for Array Integration (VAAI)
Storage network design for performance and redundancy
Connecting to Fibre and iSCSI 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 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 11 – VMware File System (VMFS)

Unique file system properties of VMFS
Creating and managing shared Volumes
Managing VMFS capacity with LUN spanning and LUN expansion
Understand VMware multipath options
Benefits of using vendor multipath solutions
Understanding and selecting multipathing policies
VMFS performance, scalability and reliability considerations
Review storage queuing, I/O aborts and other storage issues
Diagnose and troubleshoot storage performance
VMware vSphere Flash Read Cache description and use cases
Troubleshooting VMFS issues
Use esxtop to review datastore I/O activity

Chapter 12 – Storage Profiles

SAN and user defined storage profiles
Using storage speed, replication to define storage capabilities
VMware APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA)
Creating VM storage profiles
VM/Storage compliance checks
Remediating incorrectly placed VM
Understanding Storage I/O Control
Enable priority storage queues with Storage I/O control

Chapter 13 – Storage Load Balancing with SDRS Clusters

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

Chapter 14 – 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 15 – Managing ESXi Host Configurations with Host Profiles

The challenge of maintaining approved ESXi host configurations
Using Host Profiles to harvest an ESXi host configuration rule set
Updating a Host Profile rule set
Attaching a Host Profile rule set to an ESXi host and completing a compliance scan
Remediating non-compliant host configurations and verifying host configuration compliance

Chapter 16 – 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 17 – 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 18 – Distributed vSwitch Features and Scalability

Features and benefits of Distributed vSwitches
Role 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 healt

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 meet your unique training needs
Distance training
Mentoring, implementation planning and assistance

For group discounts or content for instructor lead deliveries please contact your authorized ESXLab.com training partner, or sales@esxlab.com