Virtualization with VMware ESX 3.5 and vCenter 2.5
Four Days —Instructor-led

Course Outline

Module 1 - Virtualization Overview

• Virtualization explained
• Virtualization vs. traditional deployments
• Common pain points of physical deployments
• How virtualization effectively addresses issues and brings new

Module 2 – ESX 3.5 Server Installation

• Selecting, validating and preparing your server
• Sizing Service Console and VMkernel resources
• Storage controllers, disks and partitions
• Software installation and licensing
• Installation recommendations and best practices
• First look at the VMware Virtual Infrastructure Client

Module 3 - Virtual Networking Concepts

• Virtual Machine, IP Storage and management concepts
• Virtual Switches, Ports and Port Groups
• Virtual Switch Sizing

Module 4 – Network Attached Storage

• Benefits of Shared Storage
• Shared Storage options
• NFS Overview
• Configuring ESX to use NFS Shares
• Troubleshooting NFS connections

Module 5 - Virtual Machines

• VM virtual hardware, options and limits
• Sizing and creating a new VM
• Adding, modifying and removing Virtual Hardware
• Working with a VM’s BIOS
• VMware remote console applications
• Installing an OS into a VM
• Driver installation and customization
• Best practices for monitoring and scalability
• Accessing VMs and servers remotely via the Web
• Understanding what should and should not be virtualized

Module 6 - vCenter

• vCenter architectural and feature overview
• vCenter components
• License Server and Licensing Options
• vCenter Inventory and views
• Host and Server based licensing models

Module 7 - vCenter Inventory

• vCenter's four views into Virtual Infrastructure
• Role of the datacenter
• Using folders to impart political, geographic or technical boundaries
• Importing ESX hosts into vCenter management
• Troubleshooting vCenter

Module 8 – Virtual Machine Deployment

• Master images
• Creating, modifying, updating and working with Templates
• Patching and updating Templates
• Cloning
• Template and Cloning Best practices
• Performance considerations

Module 9 – Securing VMware ESX

• VMware Security model
• Configuring local users and groups
• Managing local permissions
• vCenter security model
• Local, Domain and Active Directory users and groups
• How permissions are applied

Module 10 - Advanced Virtual Networking

• Up-linking Virtual and Physical Network segments using NICs
• NIC teaming for redundancy and Performance
• Connecting to vLANs
• Enhanced Network Security
• Virtual routers and firewalls

Module 11 - Using iSCSI and Fibre Channel Shared Storage

• Fibre SAN overview
• Identifying and using Fibre Host Bus Adapters
• Scanning and Rescanning Fibre SANs
• Partitioning Fibre SAN Storage
• Multi-pathing in a Fibre SAN environment
• Performance considerations and best practices
• iSCSI overview
• Virtual and physical iSCSI adapters
• Making virtual iSCSI adapters
• Connecting to iSCSI storage
• Scanning iSCSI SANS
• Performance considerations and best practices

Module 12 – The VMware File System

• VMFS Overview
• Unique file system properties
• Managing shared Volumes
• Creating new VMFS partitions
• Managing VMFS capacity with LUN spanning
• Multi-pathing with Fibre and iSCSI SANs
• VMFS performance considerations

Module 13 – Management of ESX Resources

• How ESX provides resources to VMs
• Shares, Reservations and Limits
• CPU resource scheduling
• Memory resource scheduling
• Disk I/O bandwidth management
• Network bandwidth management
• Resource Pools

Module 14 - VMotion

• Moving Virtual Machines
• Migrations to new ESX hosts, datastores
• Hot Migrations with VMotion
• VMotion requirements
• How VMotion works
• Troubleshooting VMotion
• Storage VMotion

Module 15 – Clustering with Distributed Resource Scheduler

• Delegated resource management with Resource Pools
• Resource balanced clusters with VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler
• DRS Cluster configuration
• Isolation response and policy overrides

Module 16 – High Availability Clustering

• Application level clusters such as MSCS
• Cluster strategies using MSCS
• Using VMs as cluster peers with MSCS
• VMware High Availability clusters