Vmware vSphere: Advanced Administration

This five-day course provides hands-on training to equip students with a range of skills: from performing routine VMware vSphere® 7 administrative tasks to complex vSphere operations and configurations. Through lab-based activities, students are immersed in real-life situations faced by VMBeans, a fictitious company. These situations expose students to real-life scenarios faced by companies that are building and scaling their virtual infrastructure.

This course uses scenario-based lab exercises and does not provide guided step-by-step instructions. To complete the scenario-based lab exercises, you are required to analyze the task, research, and deduce the required solution. References and suggested documentation are provided.

Approximately 90% of the class is application-focused and taught through labs. The course aligns fully with the VMware Certified Advanced Professional – Data Center Virtualization Deploy exam objectives.

Product Alignment

• VMware ESXi™ 7
• VMware vCenter Server 7

Target Audience

• System administrators
• System engineer

• Enable cluster features and configure vSphere storage and networking
• Use host profiles to automate host configurations
• Use Cluster Quickstart to create a VMware vSAN™ enabled cluster
• Configure the VMware vCenter Server® identity provider
• Troubleshoot host connectivity and storage connectivity
• Perform lifecycle operations on vSphere components
• Implement security hardening guidelines to vSphere and virtual machines

In order to facilitate your VMware e-courseware provision QA will share your name and email address (that which we have registered for you on our business systems) with VMware. VMware will then send you directly the details of your e-courseware access no less than 48 hours before your course is due to take place. VMware will not use these details for any other purpose than provisioning you with your e-courseware.

Please note that these details are held by VMware outside of the EU. If you have an existing VMware MyLearn account it is imperative that you notify QA of the email address you have registered to this account. Should you have any questions or concerns about this please contact your QA account manager.

Those delegates who are attending via either virtual or extended classroom will be required to provide either dual monitors or single monitor plus a tablet device.

Technical pre-requisites

This course requires the following prerequisites:

• Completion of VMware vSphere: Optimize and Scale [V7] course
• VMware Certified Professional – Data Center Virtualization (VCP-DCV) certification
• System administration experience on Microsoft Windows or Linux operating systems

1 Course Introduction

• Introductions and course logistics
• Course objectives
• Introduction to fictitious company: VMBeans

2 Creating and Configuring Management Clusters

• Enable cluster features that help to improve resource allocation and availability of virtual machines
• Use standard virtual switches to create networking in a cluster
• Recognize when to use VMware vSphere® vMotion®
• Recognize requirements for using iSCSI
• Identify the purpose of iSCSI multipathing
• Select the appropriate vSphere storage types to meet requirements
• Recognize when to configure ESXi NTP support
• Recognize ESXi user account best practices
• Configure ESXi host settings
• Use host profiles appropriately

3 Creating and Configuring Productions Clusters

• Use Cluster Quickstart to create a vSAN enabled cluster
• Configure advanced vSphere HA settings
• Recognize the benefits of Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS)
• Configure the vCenter Server identity provider
• Assign specific permissions and roles to ADFS users
• Recognize how Enhanced vMotion Compatibility benefits VM mobility
• Perform a Cross vCenter Server Migration
• Use content libraries to share virtual machine templates between sites

4 Troubleshooting vSphere and Backing Up Configurations

• Troubleshoot ESXi connectivity issues
• Troubleshoot iSCSI storage issues
• Troubleshoot vSphere cluster resources
• Troubleshoot VMware PowerCLI™ issues
• Back up vCenter Server

5 Lifecycle Management

• Troubleshoot upgrade-blocking issues
• Increase logging levels on vCenter Server
• Configure a VMware Tools™ shared repository
• Upgrade vCenter Server
• Upgrade ESXi
• Upgrade VMware Tools
• Upgrade Virtual Machine Compatibility
• Work with VM placement rules

6 vSphere Security

• Manage advanced virtual machine configurations
• Configure a key management server
• Encrypt virtual machines using vSphere VM encryption
• Secure VMs in transit with encrypted vSphere vMotion
• Identify and implement different ESXi CPU scheduler options
• Apply security hardening guidelines to ESXi hosts
• Replace vCenter Server certificates with trusted CA-signed certificates
• Deploy a new vCenter Server instance
• Reconfigure the primary network identifier for vCenter Server