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Home » Technology » Cloud » VMware vSphere 6.5 Boot Camp

Course Skill Level:

Intermediate to Advanced

Course Duration:

5 day/s

  • Course Delivery Format:

    Live, instructor-led.

  • Course Category:

    Cloud

  • Course Code:

    VS65BCK21L09

Who should attend & recommended skills:

Attendees should have user, operator, or administrator experience. Experience installing, configuring, & managing experience on common operating systems, and PC server hardware, disk partitioning, IP addressing, O/S installation, networking, etc. is recommended.

Who should attend & recommended skills

  • Anyone who wants 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
  • Operators responsible for day-to-day operation of 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.
  • PC server hardware, disk partitioning, IP addressing, O/S installation, networking, etc.: Basic (1+ years’ experience) required
  • User, operator or administrator experience: Basic (1+ years’) experience on common operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, Linux, UNIX, etc.
  • Installing, configuring and managing operating systems, storage systems and or networks: Basic (1-2 years’ experience) useful but not required

About this course

This powerful 5-day, 10 hour per day extended hours class is an intensive introduction to VMware vSphere including VMware ESXi 6.5 and vCenter 6.5. This course has been completely rewritten to reflect the most recent changes introduced in vSphere 6.5. Our courseware and labs have been fully updated and now use Host Client and Web Client rather than legacy vSphere Client for both presentation material and lab procedures.
Assuming no prior virtualization experience, this class starts with the basics and rapidly progresses to advanced topics. With 40+% of class time is devoted to labs, students learn the skills they need to become effective vSphere administrators.
Labs start with installation and configuration of stand-alone ESXi servers and progress to shared storage, networking and centralized management. The class continues to advanced topics including resource balancing, high availability, power management, back up and recovery, performance, vCenter redundancy, VM redundancy. Disaster preparedness, rapid deployment and VM cold, hot and storage migration.
This class is unique in its approach; which is to identify and eliminate common IT pain points using vSphere. Students learn how to deliver business value; not just the technical or mechanical aspects of the software.
Max Attendees:
– We generally recommend no more than 16 students per class
– We can provide concurrent lab access for 150+ students

Skills acquired & topics covered

  • At the end of the course, attendees will be able to:
  • Explain the many significant benefits of virtualization
  • Install ESXi Server according to best practices
  • Upgrade and use Host Client to manage stand alone ESXi hosts
  • Create virtual and virtual to physical network configurations
  • Configure and manage local storage resources
  • Use vSwitch policies to improve network security
  • Explain and select the optimal pNIC teaming strategy for network availability and performance
  • Implement Jumbo Frames to improve network throughput and reduce protocol overhead
  • Define and use file share (NAS / NFS) datastores
  • Create virtual machines, install operating systems and applications
  • Install, configure and upgrade VMware Tools
  • Install, configure and update the Platform Service Controller and vCenter Server Appliance
  • Use rapid deployment to consistently and quickly deploy new virtual machines
  • Create clones – one-time copies of virtual machine
  • Use Guest OS customization to rapidly configure new VMs according to requirements
  • Configure and use hotplug hardware including hot-add vCPUs and Memory
  • Add and grow virtual disks including system disks and secondary volumes
  • Configure and use roles. Add, manage, monitor and secure users and groups
  • Understand the benefits and trade offs of network attached storage and Fibre, iSCSI SANs
  • Configure and use shared SAN storage including Fibre SAN, iSCSI SAN
  • Use Raw Device Maps to give VMs direct connectivity to SAN volumes
  • Create VMFS 5 datastores. Extend VMFS datastores using LUN spanning and expansion
  • Explain and use VMware’s three multipathing policies for storage performance and availability
  • Use vCenter alarms to monitor ESXi, VM, storage and network health, performance, state
  • Use Resource Pools to delegate host / cluster pCPU, pRAM to meet Service Level Agreements
  • Perform VM cold migrations, hot migrations and Storage VMotion
  • Configure and manage server CPU and Memory capacity and maintain VM responsiveness with Distributed Resource Schedule load balanced clusters
  • Use HA to minimize VM down time due to ESXi host failures, storage network failures or SAN failures
  • Use VMware Fault Tolerance to eliminate VM down time due to host, network or storage failures
  • Implement a disaster recovery strategy using VMware Replication
  • Use vSphere Replication to hot replicate and recover business critical Virtual Machines
  • Patch and update ESXi servers using vCenter Update Manager
  • Monitor and tune ESXi hosts and virtual machine for best performance
  • Build, configure, and use distributed virtual switches. Migrate hosts and networking to dvSwitches
  • Troubleshoot common problems

Course breakdown / modules

  • Virtualization explained
  • How VMware virtualization compares to traditional PC deployments- Common pain points in PC Server management
  • How virtualization effectively addresses common IT issues
  • VMware vSphere software products
  • What’s New and Improved in vSphere 6.5

  • Understanding ESXi
  • Selecting, validating and preparing your server
  • Storage controllers, disks and partitions
  • Software installation and best practices
  • Joining ESXi to a Domain
  • Local User Management and Policies
  • First look at the VMware vSphere Client and VMware Host Client

  • vNetwork standard and distributed virtual Switches
  • Virtual Switches, Ports and Port Groups
  • Creating VMkernel ports
  • Creating, sizing and customizing Virtual Switches

  • Use vSwitch Security policies to defend against malicious VM network activity
  • Explain and implement all five physical NIC team policies
  • Improve network health and fault detection by using Beaconing
  • How to enable and test Jumbo Frames

  • Benefits Shared Storage offer to Virtual Infrastructure
  • NFS Overview
  • Configuring ESXi to use NFS Shares
  • Configuring NFS for performance and redundancy
  • NFS Use Cases
  • Troubleshooting NFS connections

  • VM virtual hardware, options and limits
  • Sizing and creating a new VM
  • Assigning, modifying and removing Virtual Hardware
  • Working with a VM’s BIOS
  • VMware remote console applications
  • Installing an OS into a VM
  • Driver installation and customization

  • The need for Identity Source management
  • Installing an external Platform Service Controller
  • Installing and configuring vCenter Server Appliance
  • Connecting Single Sign On (SSO) to Active Directory and other identity sources
  • vCenter feature overview and components
  • Organizing vCenter’s inventory views
  • Importing ESXi hosts into vCenter management
  • Administering vCenter Server with Web Client

  • Templates – Virtual Machine Golden Master images
  • Creating, modifying, updating and working with Templates
  • Patching, and refreshing Templates
  • Cloning, one time copies of VMs
  • Best practices for cloning and templating
  • Adding and resizing virtual disks
  • Hotplug VM virtual CPUs and Memory

  • VMware Security model
  • Configuring local users and groups
  • Managing local permissions
  • vCenter security model
  • Local, Domain and Active Directory users and groups
  • How permissions are applied

  • Fibre SAN overview
  • Identifying and using Fibre Host Bus Adapters
  • Scanning and rescanning Fibre and iSCSI SANs
  • iSCSI overview
  • Virtual and physical iSCSI adapters
  • Connecting to iSCSI storage
  • Performance and redundancy considerations and best practices
  • Understanding the benefits of VMware VAAI compliant storage

  • 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

  • Unique file system properties of VMFS
  • Managing shared Volumes
  • Creating new VMFS partitions
  • Managing VMFS capacity with LUN spanning and LUN expansion
  • Native and 3rd party Multipathing with Fibre and iSCSI SANs
  • VMFS performance considerations
  • VMFS scalability and reliability

  • Alarm categories and definitions
  • Creating custom alarms and actions
  • Reviewing alarms and acknowledging them

  • How ESXi delivers resources to VMs
  • Shares, Reservations and Limits
  • CPU resource scheduling
  • Memory resource scheduling
  • Resource Pools

  • 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

  • Delegated resource management with Resource Pools
  • Resource balanced clusters with VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler
  • DRS Cluster configuration and tuning
  • Per-VM cluster policy overrides
  • Learn the features and benefits of DRS Power Management

  • High Availability options to minimize unplanned down time
  • VMware High Availability clusters
  • VMware Fault Tolerance

  • How Fault Tolerance provides continuous VM availability during ESXi host, storage network and SAN storage failures
  • How to configure ESXi hosts and networks to enable Fault Tolerance
  • How to configure, enable and monitor Fault Tolerance on VMs
  • Managing Fault Tolerance protected VMs
  • Fault Tolerance scalability, performance and limitations

  • Explain vSphere Replication features and Use Cases
  • Import the vSphere Replication virtual appliance
  • Configure vSphere Replication including Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs)
  • Enable vSphere Replication on a VM
  • Recover a VM using vSphere Replication

  • Configure and enable VMware Update Manager
  • Establishing a patch baseline
  • Verifying compliance and patching ESXi hosts

  • VMkernel CPU and memory resource management mechanisms
  • Tuning VM storage I/O performance
  • Identifying and resolving resource contention
  • Monitoring VM and ESXi host performance
  • Performance and capacity planning strategies

  • Features and benefits of dvSwitches vs. Standard vSwitches
  • How to create a new dvSwitches
  • Role of dvUplink ports and dvSwitch Port Groups
  • Migrating physical NICs to dvSwitches
  • Migrating VMs and VMkernel ports to dvSwitches

  • Consolidation guidelines for VMs and Storage
  • Determining which workloads to consolidate
  • Other considerations

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