VMware vSphere 8.0 with ESXi and vCenter

VMware vSphere 8.0 with ESXi and vCenter Courseware (VS80EV)

DevOpsVMware

This powerful 5-day, 8hr/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 hands-on 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, including 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.

VMware vSphere 8.0 Boot Camp

Want a more in-depth introduction to vSphere 8.0? Check out our extended hours VMware vSphere 8.0 Boot Camp class.

Remote Lab Availability

Student labs for this class is available at a cost of $200USD / lab for a 5-day event (instructor labs are always free). Please contact us to get more details.

Note: VMware vSphere is enterprise class software that is very hardware intensive. Because of the hardware costs, software licensing costs, build complexity and the very low likelihood of success, we do not offer an option to set up compatible labs on your local PCs or servers.

Publisher: ESXLab

Benefits

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

Outline

  1. Course Introduction
    1. vSphere 8.0 overview
    2. Brief overview of the course and labs
  2. Virtualisation Infrastructure Overview
    1. Virtualization explained
    2. How virtualization solves common issues with workload management
    3. Overview of VMware vSphere software components and features
    4. What's New in vSphere 8.0
  3. How to Install, Configure ESXi 8.0
    1. Understanding ESXi
    2. Selecting, validating and preparing your server
    3. Software installation and best practices
    4. Join ESXi to a Domain
    5. Local User Management and Policies
    6. Managing ESXi hosts with Host Client
  4. Introduction to Virtual and Physical Networking
    1. vNetwork standard virtual Switches
    2. Virtual Switches, Ports and Port Groups
    3. Creating and configuring VMkernel NICs for ESXi networking
    4. vSwitch pNIC teaming for performance and reliability
  5. Connecting to NAS / NFS Shared Storage
    1. Shared Storage benefits
    2. NFS Overview
    3. Configuring ESXi to use NFS shares
    4. NFS Use Cases
    5. Troubleshooting NFS common problems
  6. Virtual Hardware and Virtual Machines
    1. VM virtual hardware, options and maximums
    2. Sizing and creating a new VM
    3. Assigning, modifying and removing Virtual Hardware
    4. VMware remote console applications
    5. Installing an OS into a VM
    6. Saving and restoring a VM’s state with snapshots
  7. vCenter Server Appliance
    1. vCenter overview and components
    2. Installing and configuring vCenter Server Appliance
    3. Complete post-install configuration tasks using vCSA’s VAMI interface
    4. Connecting vCenter’s base Linux Photon OS to Active Directory
    5. Updating Single Sign On’s directory source database to query Active Directory
    6. Organizing vCenter's inventory views
    7. Importing ESXi hosts into vCenter management
    8. Administering vCenter Server with HTML 5 based vSphere Client
  8. VM Rapid Deployment using Templates, Clones
    1. Virtual Machine Golden Master rapid deployment using templates
    2. Creating, updating and working with Templates
    3. Rapid ad-hoc VM duplication using Cloning
    4. Best practices for cloning and templating
  9. Working with VM Hot Plug Virtual Hardware
    1. Update VM vHardware with no downtime with hotplug virtual hardware
    2. Configuring VMs to support hotplug vCPUs and vRAM
    3. Hot-plugging vNICs and vDisks into a running VM
    4. Windows Guest OS experience when hotplugging virtual hardware
  10. Working with Shared Storage
    1. Fibre SAN overview
    2. World Wide Names and LUN identifiers
    3. Fibre Soft Zoning and Hard Zoning
    4. iSCSI overview
    5. Virtual and physical iSCSI adapters
    6. Configuring ESXi’s iSCSI software adapter
    7. Scanning and rescanning iSCSI volumes
    8. Performance and redundancy considerations and best practices
    9. Storage and storage network design and best practices
    10. Understanding the benefits of VMware VAAI compliant storage
  11. VMFS – VMware Cluster File System
    1. VMFS 6 features and benefits
    2. Creating new VMFS datastores
    3. Managing VMFS capacity with LUN spanning and LUN expansion
    4. Native and 3rd party Multipathing including policies, benefits and use cases
    5. VMFS performance, design and configuration tips
  12. The ESXi and vCenter Permission Model
    1. VMware Security model
    2. Configuring local users and groups
    3. Managing local permissions
    4. Granting access to local and Active Directory based users and groups
    5. How permissions are applied
  13. Virtual Infrastructure Monitoring with vCenter Alarms
    1. Alarm categories and definitions
    2. Creating custom alarms and setting alarm actions
    3. Configure vCenter so it can send E-mail and SNMP alerts
    4. Reviewing existing alarms and acknowledging them
    5. Identify the most useful alarms to review and enable
  14. Compute Resource Management with Resource Pools
    1. Delegate compute resources in bulk using Resource Pools
    2. How ESXi delivers resources to VMs
    3. Compute resource tunes - Shares, Reservations and Limits
    4. Configure and test predictable compute resource delegations
  15. VMotion Migration, Cold Migration, Storage VMotion
    1. Cold migrate VMs to new ESXi hosts, datastores
    2. Hot VM compute state migrations between ESXi hosts with VMotion
    3. VMotion requirements and dependencies
    4. How VMotion works – detailed explanation
    5. How to test ESXi hosts and VMs for VMotion compatibility
    6. Hot VM disk state migrations between datastores with Storage VMotion
  16. Distributed Resource Scheduling Load Balanced Clusters
    1. Automatic CPU and Memory resource balancing clusters with VMware DRS
    2. DRS Cluster configuration and tuning
    3. Per-VM cluster policy overrides
    4. Features, benefits and use cases for Enhanced VMotion Compatibility (EVC)
    5. Configuring Per-VM EVC
  17. Rapid VM Failure Recovery with High Availability Clusters
    1. High Availability options to minimize unplanned VM down time due to infrastructure issues
    2. VMware HA policies to protect against ESXi host, storage network and SAN volume failures
    3. Admission Control for guaranteed compute resource availability after a host failure
    4. Heartbeat Datastores to quickly resolve host isolation vs. host failure situations
  18. VMware Lifecycle Manager
    1. Configure and enable VMware Lifecycle Manager
    2. Create an ESXi host upgrade baseline
    3. Checking ESXi host compliance with attached host upgrade baselines
    4. How to upgrade ESXi 7.0 hosts to ESXi 8.0 using VLM
  19. Managing Scalability and Performance
    1. VMkernel CPU and memory resource management mechanisms
    2. Tuning VM storage I/O performance
    3. Identifying and resolving resource contention
    4. Monitoring VM and ESXi host performance
    5. Performance and capacity planning strategies
  20. Final Thoughts
    1. What to virtualize and what not to virtualize
    2. VM guest OS security in a virtual environment
    3. How to protect VMs and their data from unauthorized copying
    4. Useful books, white papers and online resources
  21. Hands-on Lab Tasks
    1. Connect to your dedicated Remote Lab environment
    2. Install ESXi 8.0, and perform post-install configurations
    3. Create, update Standard vSwitches. Use pNIC Teams for performance and redundancy
    4. Define, connect to and browse NFS based datastores
    5. Create a Virtual Machine and install a guest OS into the VM
    6. Install VMware Tools into a VM. Add 3rd party tools and utilities into a VM
    7. Export a VM in Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) and then re-import it back into ESXi
    8. Install and configure the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA)
    9. Configure vCSA Single Sign On (SSO) identity sources including Active Directory
    10. Configure vCenter's inventory views to organize inventory objects
    11. Import ESXi hosts into vCenter management
    12. Work with VM Clones and Templates. Convert a VM into a template
    13. Rapidly deploy new VMs from template
    14. Perform ad-hoc VMs rapid deployments using VM cloning
    15. Rapidly deploy VMs using Guest OS Customization Specifications
    16. Work with hot-add virtual hardware
    17. Hot add, and then grow, a secondary virtual disk
    18. Grow a Windows system disk and partition with no downtime
    19. Configure and test hotplug memory
    20. Hotplug a new virtual CPU package into a running VM
    21. Configure the Software iSCSI adapter. Scan for and review SAN based storage volumes
    22. VMware VMFS 6 – VMware cluster file system
    23. Grow VMFS volumes using LUN Spans. Growing volumes and their VMFS datastores
    24. Review and update VMFS properties including Space Reclaim
    25. Review and select the best VMFS multipath policy for optimal performance and reliability
    26. Work with vCenter permissions using stock and custom Roles
    27. Configure vCenter alarms to monitor select infrastructure objects
    28. Configure Alarm actions to Send SNMP traps to a trap receiver on high VM compute resource use
    29. Create and tune Resource Pools. Test Resource Pool compute resource delegations
    30. Cold Migrate VMs from one ESXi host and storage volume to another
    31. Hot VMotion migrate the running compute state of a VM from one ESXi host to another
    32. Hot Storage migrate the running disk state of a VM from one datastore to another
    33. Build and test an automated compute resource load balancing DRS cluster
    34. Create and configure a VMware High Availability cluster
    35. Manually fail a host and watch the cluster place and restart impacted VMs onto healthy hosts
    36. Set up VMware Lifecycle Manager to update/update ESXi hosts
    37. Perform an ESXi host Compliance Scan, review host non-compliance
    38. Use VLM to automatically upgrade an ESXi 7.0 host to ESXi 8.0
    39. Use VLM to upgrade a VM’s virtual hardware to ESXi 8.0 compatibility

Required 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.

Useful Prerequisites

Familiarization with virtualization concepts and prior experience with vSphere or any other virtualization platform is helpful but not required.

License

Length: 5 days | $225.00 per copy

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What is Included?
  • Student Manual
  • Extra Trainer Files
  • PowerPoint Presentation