Deploying VMware^® vSphere: Hands-On

Enterprise Virtualisation Concepts

• Virtualising physical hardware
• Mapping a physical data centre topology to a virtual one
• Sharing storage resources

Installing and Configuring ESXi Server

First steps

• Meeting minimum system requirements
• Walking through the installation steps
• Working with the Direct Console User Interface (DCUI)

Leveraging vCenter Server 5

• vCenter vs. Direct Connection for management
• Recognising and applying additional vCenter management objects

Configuring Network Resources

Defining vSphere network terminology

• Utilising physical network resources
• Establishing ports and port groups

Designing virtual switches

• Engineering a virtual switch layout
• Changing switch assignments and properties
• Firewalling with virtual switches
• Combining physical network cards for automatic failover
• Comparing standard vswitches vs. distributed vswitches

Establishing policies

• Implementing network policies for security
• Shaping network traffic
• Teaming network cards for performance

Accessing Shared Storage

Creating and managing a datastore

• Configuring VMkernel access to LUNs
• Setting up a Network File System (NFS) datastore
• Ensuring continued access with multipathing
• Comparing ESXi Server datastore options

Enabling Fibre Channel storage

• Controlling access to the shared storage
• Making Fibre Channel LUNs available

Completing iSCSI setups

• Identifying the components of iSCSI
• Authenticating the ESXi Server with CHAP

Initiating VMFS data stores

• Creating a VMFS
• Extending a VMFS

Managing via VirtualCenter

Installing the vCenter components

• vCenter vs. vSphere Client
• Host-based licensing vs. License Server
• vSphere license keys
• Maintaining and adding an ESXi Server to the inventory

vCenter and multiple data centres

• Grouping data centres in folders
• Combining hosts into a cluster

Working with Virtual Machines

Creating virtual machines

• Creating a base virtual machine image
• Enabling multiple CPUs with Virtual SMP

Customising advanced VM features

• Improving performance with VMware Tools
• Provisioning new VMs with templates and clones

Managing VMs

• Moving VMs between ESXi Servers
• Preserving VM states with snapshots

Securing Access to the Infrastructure

Setting up security

• Authoring vCenter permissions
• Establishing permission inheritance
• Assessing permissions at different inventory levels

Initiating Web access controls

• Providing end user access to VMs
• Logging into vCenter
• Managing VMs from the Web

Extending Resource Management

Handling resource pools

• Allocating CPU and memory resources
• Defining Shares, Reservations and Limits
• Creating resource pools

vSphere enterprise features

• Organising data centre clusters
• Adding hosts to a High Availability (HA) cluster
• Moving a powered-on VM to another machine with VMotion
• Balancing resources with Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)
• VMware Consolidated Backup