VSAA8 - VMware vSphere: Advanced Administration V8

Course Overview

This five-day course provides hands-on training to equip students with a range of skills, from performing routine VMware vSphere 8 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. This course utilizes labs to teach students how to effectively navigate and manage vSphere. The course aligns fully with the VMware Certified Advanced Professional – Data Center Virtualization Deploy exam objectives.

Product Alignment

VMware ESXi 8.0
VMware vCenter 8.0

Course Content

Course Introduction
Introductions and course logistics
Course objectives

Creating and Configuring Management Clusters

Create a vSphere cluster for management workloads
Activate vSphere cluster features that help to improve resource allocation and availability of virtual machines
Use standard virtual switches to create networking in a cluster
Select the appropriate vSphere storage types to meet requirements
Configure iSCSI storage
Configure VMFS and NFS datastores
Recognize when to configure ESXi NTP and PTP support
Recognize ESXi user account best practices
Configure ESXi host settings
Use vSphere configuration profiles to maintain consistent ESXi host configurations

Creating and Configuring Production Clusters

Use Cluster Quickstart to create a vSAN-activated cluster
Configure advanced vSphere HA settings
Configure the vCenter identity provider
Assign specific permissions and roles to Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) users
Configure Enhanced vMotion Compatibility on a cluster and a VM
Perform a Cross vCenter Server migration
Use content libraries to share virtual machine templates between sites
Manage VM and ESXi host resources using resource pools, scalable shares, and vSphere DRS rules

Troubleshooting vSphere and Backing Up Configurations

Troubleshoot ESXi connectivity issues
Troubleshoot ESXi storage issues
Troubleshoot vSphere cluster issues
Troubleshoot PowerCLI issues
Generate vCenter and ESXi log bundles
Back up vCenter
Create a vCenter profile to standardize configurations in the environment

Lifecycle Management

Troubleshoot upgrade-blocking issues
Increase logging levels on vCenter
Configure a VMware Tools™ shared repository
Upgrade vCenter
Upgrade ESXi
Upgrade VMware Tools
Upgrade virtual machine hardware compatibility

vSphere Security

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 certificates with trusted CA-signed certificates
Reconfigure the primary network identifier for a vCenter instance

Who should attend

System administrators
System engineers

Prerequisites

This course requires completion of the following prerequisites:
VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage
VMware vSphere: Operate, Scale, and Secure
Working knowledge of VMware vSAN™
System administration experience on Microsoft Windows or Linux operating systems

Course Objectives

By the end of the course, you should be able to meet the following objectives:
Configure VMware vCenter® and VMware ESXi™
Configure and manage a vSphere cluster solution for vSphere HA, vSphere DRS, and vSAN
Configure vSphere storage and networking
Perform lifecycle operations on vSphere components
Troubleshoot vSphere infrastructure and connectivity issues
Back up vCenter configurations
Implement solutions for securing the vSphere infrastructure