VMware vSphere: Skills for Operators (VSO)

Course Introduction

• Introductions and course logistics
• Course objectives

Introduction to vSphere and the Software-Defined Data Center

• Describe how vSphere fits into the software-defined data center and the cloud infrastructure
• Explain how vSphere interacts with CPUs, memory, networks, and storage
• Use vSphere Client to access and manage your vCenter Server system and ESXi host
• Compare virtual machine hardware version 14 to other versions
• Identify the virtual network adapters, and describe the enhanced VMXNET3
• Compare the types of virtual disk provisioning

Creating Virtual Machines

• Create, provision, and remove a virtual machine
• Explain the importance of VMware Tools™
• Describe how to import a virtual appliance OVF template

vCenter Server

• Describe the vCenter Server architecture
• Discuss how ESXi hosts communicate with vCenter Server
• Use vSphere Client to manage the vCenter Server inventory
• Add data center and organizational objects to vCenter Server
• Add hosts to vCenter Server
• Discuss how to create custom inventory tags for inventory objects
• Monitor VMware vCenter® Server ApplianceTM
• Monitor vCenter Server Appliance for service and disk space usage
• Use vSphere alarms for resource exhaustion and service failures

Configuring and Managing Virtual Networks

• Describe the virtual switch connection types
• Configure and view standard switch configurations, such as virtual machine port group, VMkernel port, VLAN, and security features
• List the features comparison of standard and distributed switches

Virtual Storage

• Describe vSphere storage technologies and datastores

Virtual Machine Management

• Use templates and cloning to deploy new virtual machines
• Enable guest operating system customization by vCenter Server
• Upgrade a virtual machine’s hardware
• Perform an instant clone of a VM
• Describe virtual machine settings and options
• Add a hot-pluggable device
• Dynamically increase the size of a virtual disk
• Add a raw device mapping (RDM) to a virtual machine
• Perform a vSphere vMotion migration
• Perform a vSphere Storage vMotion migration

Resource Management and Monitoring

• Use the performance-tuning methodology and resource monitoring tools
• Use performance charts to view and improve performance
• Monitor the key factors that can affect the virtual machine’s performance: CPU, memory, disk, and network bandwidth use
• Create alarms with condition-based triggers
• Create alarms with event-based triggers
• View and acknowledge triggered alarms

vSphere HA

• Describe the options that you can configure to make your vSphere environment highly available
• Discuss the response of vSphere HA when an ESXi host, a virtual machine, or an application fails

vSphere DRS

• Describe the functions of a vSphere DRS cluster
• Create a vSphere DRS cluster
• View information about a vSphere DRS cluster
• Remove a host from a vSphere DRS cluster