VMware vSphere 8.0 Skill Up

VMware vSphere 8.0 Skill Up (VS80SU)

Course Length: 5 days
Delivery Methods: Available as private class only
Course Overview

This powerful, fast paced 5-day class provides in-depth training on VMware vSphere 8.0. This course is intended for vSphere professionals who want to take their knowledge and skills to the next level. In this course, we assume that you already have a basic understanding of virtualization and work experience as a vSphere VM owner, as an operator or as a junior administrator. This could be on earlier versions of vSphere or on vSphere 8.0.

This course is popular with people who need to upgrade their VMware vSphere 8.0 knowledge and skills. 

The approach taken with this course is – Learn by doing as 45+% of class time is devoted to hands-on labs.

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

Now that Broadcom has completed its takeover of VMware is and VMware prices have increased substantially, it is even more important than ever for you to maximize your ROI on your existing vSphere installation. This class will help you achieve that goal.

Course Benefits
  • Go go deeper into vSphere features and capabilities
  • Learn vSphere best practices
  • Be able to diagnose vSphere issues
  • Troubleshoot and fix common problems
  • Upgrade vSphere 6.7 / 7.0 deployments to vSphere 8.0
  • Learn how to use Lifecycle Manager to upgrade VM virtual hardware and VMware Tools
  • Manage, review and configure ESXi hosts and vCenter from the command line
  • Dig deep into performance issues with ESXtop
  • Maximize scalability and performance while minimizing their spend on vSphere 8.0 subscription licenses
  • Learn how to upgrade vCenter 6.7 or 7.0 to version 8.0
Course Outline
  1. Course Introduction
    1. Welcome to this course
    2. Course goals and objectives
    3. VMware vSphere 8.0 certification road map
  2. Install, Configure ESXi 8.0
    1. Install and configure ESXi 8.0 using best practices
    2. Enable and secure command line access including the console and Secure Shell
    3. Using Lockdown mode to restrict management access
    4. Working with ESXi log files
    5. Working with VMkernel Paging Files on local storage, flash storage and shared storage
    6. Use command line tools to review and update host configurations
    7. Using command line tools to create/manage users and permissions
  3. Introduction to Virtual and Physical Networking
    1. Create / update standard Virtual Switches
    2. Create, configure VMkernel NICs
    3. Create, configure vSwitch Port Groups
    4. Network bandwidth management using Traffic Shaping
    5. Creating and updating pNIC teams
    6. Enabling and configuring Cisco Discovery Protocol
  4. Advanced Virtual Networking
    1. Configuring vSwitch Security policies Promiscuous Mode, Forged Transmits and MAC Address Changes
    2. Improve network failure detection and recovery with Beacon Probing
    3. Configure and use Jumbo Frames to improve network performance
    4. Use command line tools to create, update, configure and repair Standard vSwitches
    5. Use esxtop to monitor network activity
    6. The Five physical NIC teaming policies including the pros, cons and use cases for each one
    7. Troubleshoot networking configuration and performance issues
  5. Connecting to NAS Shared Storage
    1. Connecting to NFS v3 storage
    2. Network design for high service availability
    3. Best practices for performance and reliability
    4. NFS v4.1 features, benefits and use cases
  6. Virtual Hardware and Virtual Machines
    1. VM virtual hardware, options and maximums
    2. Creating and right-sizing Virtual Machines for CPU, memory
    3. Assigning, modifying and removing Virtual Hardware
    4. Virtual Machine best practices
    5. Import and export VMs in Open Virtual Machine Format
    6. Configure and use vDisk flash based read caching to accelerate VM read performance
  7. Upgrade and Configure vCenter Server Appliance
    1. Deploy vCenter Server Appliance from the command line and configuration files
    2. Upgrade vCenter Appliance to vCenter Appliance 8.0
    3. vCenter redundancy with vCenter High Availability
    4. Connecting Single Sign On (SSO) to Active Directory and other identity sources
    5. Create and test a vCenter Appliance backup job
  8. Virtual Machine Rapid Deployment
    1. How to create a Template VM
    2. Using Guest OS Customization for Windows, Linux and BSD UNIX
    3. Enabling, using Hotplug Virtual CPU and memory
    4. Enabling, using Hotplug disks, networking, USB devices and more
    5. Predictive and adaptive sizing strategies for VMs
    6. Troubleshooting Virtual Machine issues
    7. Features, benefits and use cases of NVMe virtual disks
    8. Use esxtop to analyze VM performance
  9. Upgrading ESXi hosts with Lifecycle Manager
    1. Configure VMware Lifecycle Manager
    2. Create a custom ESXi 8.0 ISO image
    3. Attaching a Host Upgrade baseline to a host and do a host upgrade pre-check
    4. Upgrading an ESXi host from ESXi 7.0 to ESXi 8.0
    5. Upgrading VM virtual hardware and VMware Tools using Lifecycle Manager
    6. Using command line tools to backup and restore an ESXi host’s configuration
  10. Connecting ESXi to Shared Block Mode Storage
    1. General SAN features and capabilities
    2. VMware APIs for Array Integration (VAAI)
    3. Storage network design for performance and redundancy
    4. Connecting to block mode shared storage
    5. iSCSI Hardware and Software Initiators
    6. iSCSI Static and Send Targets LUN discovery
    7. Troubleshooting storage issues
    8. Use esxtop to review storage controller and datastores configuration and I/O activity
  11. Direct VM to SAN Access with Raw Device Maps
    1. Explain Physical and Virtual Raw Device Maps (RDMs)
    2. Use cases and benefits of Raw Device Maps
    3. How Raw Device Maps work with VM cold, VMotion and Storage VMotion migrations
    4. Using RDMs to implement Virtual and Virtual/Physical Windows Fail Over Clusters
  12. VMFS – VMware's Cluster File System
    1. Features and benefits of VMFS 6
    2. Creating and managing shared Volumes
    3. Managing VMFS capacity with LUN spanning, LUN expansion
    4. Benefits, pros, cons and use cases for VMware’s three multipathing policies
    5. Review storage queuing, I/O aborts and other storage issues
    6. Diagnose and troubleshoot storage performance
    7. Troubleshooting VMFS issues
    8. VMFS best practices
  13. Storage Load Balancing with SDRS Clusters
    1. Creating and using Storage Distributed Resource Scheduling clusters (SDRS)
    2. Cluster properties for capacity and I/O load balancing
    3. Best practices for building storage clusters
  14. VMotion Migration, Cold Migration, Storage VMotion
    1. Cold Migrations to new ESXi hosts, datastores
    2. Hot Migrations with VMotion
    3. VMotion requirements and dependencies
    4. Troubleshooting VMotion
    5. Storage VMotion for hot VM disk migrations
  15. Distributed Resource Scheduling 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
  16. VMware High Availability Clusters
    1. Minimize unplanned VM down time with VMware High Availability clusters
    2. VM requirements for HA Clusters
    3. Storage fault recovery in High Availability clusters (All Paths Down, Permanent Device Loss)
    4. Monitoring VM health in HA clusters
    5. Admission Control policy settings for predictable pCPU/pRAM resource availability
    6. Identifying and troubleshooting issues in VMware HA clusters
  17. VMware Fault Tolerance
    1. Eliminate VM unplanned down time with VMware Fault Tolerance
    2. Role of the Primary and Secondary VM in a Fault Tolerance configuration
    3. Explain how Fast Checkpointing keeps the Secondary VM vCPU, vRAM, vDisk up to date
    4. Enabling VM Fault Tolerance
    5. Initial VM synchronization
    6. Testing Fault Tolerance
  18. Distributed vSwitch Features and Scalability
    1. Features and benefits of Distributed vSwitches
    2. Role of the DVUplink port group
    3. Adding ESXi hosts to dvSwitches
    4. Creating dvSwitch port groups
    5. Migrating physical NICs and VMkernel ports to dvSwitches
    6. dvSwitch configuration backup and restore
    7. Configuring custom VM MAC address generation policies
    8. Testing dvSwitch network health
  19. 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
  20. Hands-on Labs
    1. Connect to your dedicated Remote Lab environment
    2. Install of ESXi 8.0 and perform post-install configuration steps
    3. Review ESXi services and configure ESXi firewall
    4. Enable ESXi Lockdown mode to prevent direct host configuration changes
    5. Create/update Standard vSwitch configurations
    6. Configure vSwitch Security Policies for Promiscuous Mode, MAC Address Changes and Forged Transmits
    7. Configure vSwitches, VMkernel NICs for Jumbo Frame use
    8. Configure and connect to NFS storage via GUI and CLI
    9. Create a new VM according to best practices
    10. Import and configure vCenter Server Appliance from the command line
    11. Perform an upgrade of vCenter Server Appliance to v8.0
    12. Use vCLI command line tools like esxcli, localcli, vmware-cmd and other commands to review, troubleshoot and configure your ESXi host
    13. Use esxtop to monitor resource use and pinpoint performance concerns
    14. Rapidly deploy VMs from Templates and Clones
    15. Review and size VM vCPU to maximize CPU performance
    16. Enable and use Hot-plug virtual hardware
    17. Rapidly deploy VMs using Guest OS Customization Specifications
    18. Monitor storage controller queue length and performance
    19. Monitor ESXi host and VM memory use
    20. Configure and use VMware Lifecycle Manager to update an ESXi host from ESXi 7.0 to ESXi 8.0
    21. Use VMware Lifecycle Manager to upgrade a VM’s virtual hardware
    22. Connect to an iSCSI SAN
    23. Create a new VMFS 6.0 file systems
    24. Create Storage DRS clusters and use Storage DRS to manage storage capacity and I/O load
    25. Expand VMFS 6.0 file systems using LUN Spanning and LUN expansion
    26. Create, configure and test vSphere High Availability Clusters
    27. Configure All Paths Down and Permanent Device Loss policies in an HA cluster
    28. Create a multi-core Fault Tolerant VM
    29. Create and test a VMware DRS compute load balancing cluster
    30. Create Distributed vSwitches
    31. Bulk migrate VMs from Standard to Distributed vSwitch networking
    32. Work with dvSwitch Configuration Backup Up and Restore
    33. Enable and use dvSwitch Health Management
    34. Using dvSwitch port shadowing
    35. Testing network health on dvSwitches
    36. Work with dvSwitch configuration roll back and recovery
Class Materials

Each student will receive a comprehensive set of materials, including course notes and all the class examples.

Class Prerequisites

Experience in the following is required for this VMware class:

This is not a beginner level course. Attendees should have experience working with earlier versions of vSphere such as vSphere 5.x, 6.x or 7.0.

Live Private Class
  • Private Class for your Team
  • Live training
  • Online or On-location
  • Customizable
  • Expert Instructors
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