Wednesday, 8 September 2010

New Training in Beta: VMware vSphere - Skills for Storage Administrators

This course enables storage administrators to better plan and manage their storage systems to support a VMware vSphere™ environment. The course uses lecture, hands-on labs, and case studies to demonstrate vSphere interaction and operation with storage rather than to teach vSphere administration skills.

Objectives

• Explain basic concepts related to virtual computing, including vSphere server and storage virtualization
• Be cooperative partners with vSphere administrators to design, configure, manage, and troubleshoot storage in a vSphere environment
• Identify and employ tools and utilities that can be used to inspect and modify storage configuration, from a virtual machine disk to a specific datastore

Course Datasheet

Outline

Course Introduction
• Introductions and course logistics
• Course objectives
Introduction to VMware Virtualization
• Hypervisors (the VMkernel) and virtual machines
• Benefits of server virtualization
• Shared storage and the VMware features that depend on it
Comparing Storage Protocols
• Storage protocols supported by vSphere
• Comparing storage protocol types (Fibre Channel, iSCSI, NFS, and FCoE)
• Storage design considerations in a vSphere environment
VMware vStorage VMFS
• Creating a VMFS volume and using extents and Volume Grow to resize a VMFS volume
• VMFS dependence on SCSI reservations
• Options for creating virtual machine disks and the benefits of each option
• Thin provisioning and its effect on storage
LUN Considerations
• Using IOPS, MBps, and total capacity information to size LUNs
• Using esxtop or resxtop to determine IOPS and MBps
• VMFS best practices
• Strategies for virtual disk placement
Multipathing Considerations
• Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NAS multipathing
• Multipathing algorithms available in vSphere
• Multipathing software components in the vStorage stack
• Integrating active-active, active-passive, virtual port, and asymmetric logical unit access arrays into a vSphere environment
• Utilities to inspect and manage vSphere multipathing configuration
Zoning and Access Control
• Importance of configuring consistent host LUN ID numbering
• Zoning and access control for Fibre Channel
• Access control for iSCSI and NAS
• Inter-Switch Link and trunking considerations
• vSphere and Registered State Change Notifications
• Capturing Fibre Channel and IP storage traces
Snapshot and Replication Operations
• LUN replication in a vSphere environment
• Identifying a snapshot LUN in vSphere
• Controlling how the VMkernel handles snapshot LUNs
• Using snapshot LUNs for backup and disaster recovery
• VMware Consolidated Backup and the VMware API for Data Protection
• Virtual machine swap files and how they affect storage consumption
• Virtual machine snapshots and how they affect storage consumption
Storage Performance
• Storage configuration and its effect on performance
• vSphere storage queueing and how it affects performance
• vSphere utilities to monitor storage latency, capacity, and consumption
• Troubleshooting storage performance problems
Boot from SAN
• vSphere support for boot from SAN
• Advantages and disadvantages of boot from SAN
• Configuring boot from SAN