This powerful 5-day class is an intensive introduction to VMware vSphere™ 8.0 including VMware ESXi™ 8.0 and vCenter™ 8.0. This course has been completely updated to reflect the most recent changes introduced in vSphere 8.0.

Assuming no prior virtualization experience, this class starts with the basics and rapidly progresses to advanced topics. 45+% of class time is devoted to labs so students get the skills they need to become effective vSphere administrators.

Students use dedicated labs that start with installation and configuration of stand-alone ESXi hosts and progress through shared storage, networking, building VMs and centralized management. The class continues with rapid VM deployment, hot-plug virtual hardware, permissions, alarms resource management, VM high availability clusters, VM load balanced clusters, VM cold, hot and storage migration, updating / upgrading ESXi hosts and performance.

This class is unique in that, by the end of the class, students will have built a complete vSphere 8.0 environment from scratch inclulding installing and configuring ESXi 8.0 hosts and installing and configuring vCenter Server Appliance 8.0. We are the only major vSphere training provider where every student must install ESXi and vCenter to be successful.

By the end of the class, attendees will have acquired the knowledge, skills, and best practices needed to deploy, configure and administer VMware vSphere 8.0.

Chapter List

Our class consists of the following chapters:

0. Course introduction
1. Introduction to VMware vSphere 8.0
2. How to Install, Configure ESXi 8.0 (HoL¹)
3. Virtual and Physical Networking (HoL)
4. Connecting to and Using NAS Shared Storage (HoL)
5. Virtual Hardware and Virtual Machines (HoL)
6. vCenter Server Appliance (HoL)
7. VM Rapid Deployment using Templates, Clones (HoL)
8. VM Hotplug Virtual Hardware (HoL)
9. Working with Shared Storage (HoL)
10. VMware File System (VMFS) (HoL)
11. ESXi and vCenter Permission Model (HoL)
12. Infrastructure Monitoring with vCenter Alarms (HoL)
13. Resource Management with Resource Pools (HoL)
14. VMotion Migration, Cold Migration, Storage (HoL)
15. Distributed Resource Scheduling Clusters (HoL)
16. VM Failure Recovery with High Availability Clusters (HoL)
17. VMware Lifecycle Manager (HoL)
18. Managing Scalability and Performance (HoL)
19. Final Thoughts

Hands On Labs

Attendees will complete the following hands on labs during the class:

1. Connect to your dedicated Remote Lab environment
2. Install ESXi 8.0, and perform post-install configurations
3. Create, update Standard vSwitches. Use pNIC Teams for performance and redundancy
4. Define, connect to and browse NFS based datastores
5. Create a Virtual Machine and install a guest OS into the VM
6. Install VMware Tools into a VM. Add 3rd party tools and utilities into a VM
7. Export a VM in Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) and then re-import it back into ESXi
8. Install and configure the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA)
9. Configure vCSA Single Sign On (SSO) identity sources including Active Directory
10. Configure vCenter's inventory views to organize inventory objects
11. Import ESXi hosts into vCenter management
12. Work with VM Clones and Templates. Convert a VM into a template
13. Rapidly deploy new VMs from template
14. Perform ad-hoc VMs rapid deployments using VM cloning
15. Rapidly deploy VMs using Guest OS Customization Specifications
16. Work with hot-add virtual hardware
17. Hot add, and then grow, a secondary virtual disk
18. Grow a Windows system disk and partition with no downtime
19. Configure and test hotplug memory
20. Hotplug a new virtual CPU package into a running VM
21. Configure the Software iSCSI adapter. Scan for and review SAN based storage volumes
22. VMware VMFS 6 – VMware's cluster file system
23. Grow VMFS volumes using LUN Spans. Growing volumes and their VMFS datastores
24. Review and update VMFS properties including Space Reclaim
25. Review and select the best VMFS multipath policy for optimal performance and reliability
26. Work with vCenter permissions using stock and custom Roles
27. Configure vCenter alarms to monitor select infrastructure objects
28. Configure Alarm actions to Send SNMP traps to a trap receiver on high VM compute resource use
29. Create and tune Resource Pools. Test Resource Pool compute resource delegations
30. Cold Migrate VMs from one ESXi host and storage volume to another
31. Hot VMotion migrate the running compute state of a VM from one ESXi host to another
32. Hot Storage migrate the running disk state of a VM from one datastore to another
33. Build and test an automated compute resource load balancing DRS cluster
34. Create and configure a VMware High Availability cluster
35. Manually fail a host and watch the cluster place and restart impacted VMs onto healthy hosts
36. Set up VMware Lifecycle Manager to update/update ESXi hosts
37. Perform an ESXi host Compliance Scan, review host non-compliance
38. Use VLM to automatically upgrade an ESXi 7.0 host to ESXi 8.0
39. Use VLM to upgrade a VM’s virtual hardware to ESXi 8.0 compatibility