Course Introduction

• Introductions and course logistics
• Course objectives

Introduction to vSphere and the Software-Defined Data Center

• Explain basic virtualization concepts
• Describe how vSphere fits into the software-defined data center and the cloud infrastructure
• Explain how vSphere interacts with CPUs, memory, networks, and storage
• Recognize the user interfaces for accessing the vCenter Server system and ESXi hosts
• Use VMware Host Client to access and manage ESXi host

Virtual Machines

• Create and remove a virtual machine
• Provision a virtual machine with virtual devices
• Identify the files that make up a virtual machine
• Explain the importance of VMware Tools™

vCenter Server

• Describe the vCenter Server architecture
• Discuss how ESXi hosts communicate with vCenter Server
• Deploy and configure vCenter Server Appliance
• Use the vSphere Client to manage the vCenter Server inventory
• Add data center, organizational objects, and hosts to vCenter Server
• Use roles and permissions to enable users to access objects in the vCenter Server inventory
• Back up vCenter Server Appliance
• Monitor vCenter Server tasks, events, and appliance health
• Use vCenter Server High Availability to protect a vCenter Server Appliance

Configuring and Managing Virtual Networks

• Create and manage standard switches
• Describe the virtual switch connection types
• Configure virtual switch security, traffic-shaping and load-balancing policies
• Compare vSphere distributed switches and standard switches

Configuring and Managing Virtual Storage

• Identify storage protocols and storage device types
• Discuss ESXi hosts using iSCSI, NFS, and Fibre Channel storage
• Create and manage VMFS and NFS datastores
• Explain how multipathing works with iSCSI, NFS, and Fibre Channel storage
• Deploy virtual machines on a VMware vSAN datastore

Virtual Machine Management

• Use templates and cloning to deploy new virtual machines
• Modify and manage virtual machines
• Create a content library and deploy virtual machines from templates in the library
• Dynamically increase the size of a virtual disk
• Use customization specification files to customize a new virtual machine
• Perform vSphere vMotion and vSphere Storage vMotion migrations
• Create and manage virtual machine snapshots
• Examine the features and functions of VMware vSphere® Replication™

Resource Management and Monitoring

• Discuss CPU and memory concepts in a virtualized environment
• Describe what overcommitment of a resource means
• Describe methods for optimizing CPU and memory usage
• Use various tools to monitor resource use
• Create and use alarms to report certain conditions or events

vSphere Clusters

• Describe options for making a vSphere environment highly available
• Explain the vSphere HA architecture
• Configure and manage a vSphere HA cluster
• Examine the features and functions of VMware vSphere Fault Tolerance
• Configure a vSphere cluster using ESXi Cluster Quickstart
• Describe the functions of a vSphere DRS cluster
• Create a vSphere DRS cluster

Network Scalability

• Configure and manage vSphere distributed switches
• Describe how VMware vSphere Network I/O Control enhances performance
• Explain distributed switch features such as port mirroring and NetFlow

vSphere Lifecycle Management

• Describe how VMware vSphere Lifecycle Manager works
• Use vSphere Lifecycle Manager to update ESXi hosts in a cluster

Host and Management Scalability

• Use host profiles to manage ESXi configuration compliance
• Create and manage resource pools in a cluster

Storage Scalability

• Explain why VMware vSphere VMFS is a high-performance, scalable file system
• Explain VMware vSphere Storage APIs - Array Integration, VMware vSphere® API for Storage
  Awareness, and vSphere APIs for I/O Filtering
• Configure and assign virtual machine storage policies
• Create VMware vSAN storage policies
• Configure VMware vSphere Storage DRS and VMware vSphere Storage I/O Control
• Discuss vSphere support for NVMe and iSER

Introduction to vSphere with Kubernetes

• Differentiate between containers and virtual machines
• Identify the parts of a container system
• Recognize the basic architecture of Kubernetes
• Describe a basic Kubernetes workflow
• Describe the purpose of vSphere with Kubernetes and how it fits into the VMware Tanzu portfolio
• Explain the vSphere with Kubernetes supervisor cluster
• Describe the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid service