- 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