Training / Certification

This two day hands-on training course covers the requirements and effects of transitioning your VMware vSphere™ environment to VMware® ESXi. It provides the knowledge and skills necessary to make fundamental design decisions and successfully add ESXi to a deployed vSphere environment. The course is based the future version of ESXi.

Course Outline
Working with VMware ESXi
• Identify differences between ESX and ESXi
• Recognize tasks and procedures when moving to ESXi
Installing and Configuring VMware ESXi
• Analyze ESXi Installable and ESXi Embedded
• Install and configure ESXi Installable and ESXi Embedded
• Recognize the steps for upgrading to ESXi
Performing Management Tasks
• Identify hardware monitoring techniques
• Discuss system management and backup methodology
• Distinguish the log files
• Recognize security methodologies
• Employ file management practices
• Perform basic troubleshooting with the direct console user interface
Large-Scale Deployment of VMware ESXi
• Identify scripted installation programs for ESXi (SDK and Weasel)
• Analyze the commands to perform scripted installation
• Discuss best practices for large-scale deployment
Using Scripting Interfaces
• Identify the scripting interfaces for ESXi
• Discuss primary scripting interfaces
• Install VMware vSphere Management Assistant
• Identify differences between commands used with ESX and those used with ESXi
• Recognize custom commands and how to substitute VMware vSphere Command-Line Interface commands or vSphere PowerCLI cmdlets for them.

At the end of the course, you should be able to: Analyze ESXi and its benefits for your environment, Identify ESXi installation and configuration procedures, Use scripted installations for large-scale ESXi deployments, Employ scripting interfaces to manage ESXi and Identify risks when migrating to ESXi.

This three day course with 60% lecture and 40% lab exercises shows you how to follow best practices for secure design, deployment, and operation of a VMware vSphere™ environment. Through lecture, discussion, and hands-on practice, you will gain the knowledge and skills necessary to meet the security and compliance goals of your organization.

Course Outline
Module 1: Course Introduction
• Introductions and course logistics
• Online resources for security and compliance
Module 2: Security in a Virtual Environment
• Review of information security and risk management concepts
• How virtualization affects security and compliance
• Top vulnerabilities in a virtual environment
• Basic guidelines for securing a virtual environment
• Security tools and technologies
Module 3: Secure Virtual Networking
• vNetwork security architecture
• Network segmentation and traffic isolation
• Secure virtual network configuration
• Traffic isolation with private VLANs
Module 4: Protecting the Management Environment
• vCenter Server authentication, authorization, and accountingWorking with SSL certificates
• Hardening the vCenter Server system
Module 5: Protecting VMware ESX/ESXi Host Systems
• ESX and ESXi security architecture
• Controlling access to storage
• Hardening ESX and ESXi hosts.
Module 6: Hardening Virtual Machines
• Virtual machine security architecture
• Configuring security parameters
Module 7: Configuration and Change Management
• Configuration and change management goals and guidelines
• Maintaining the proper configuration of vSphere components
• Monitoring logs for security-related events
• Configuration and change management tools and technologie

If you don’t have a fancy physical iSCSI target in your lab but still want to do some testing with the esxcli command, Starwind software offers a great iSCSI alternative with their StarWind iSCSI SAN software. It can be used as shared storage for almost any application, it is fully compatible for use with VMware.

After you have created a StarWind iSCSI target, it’s ready to service connections. You can established a connection to an iSCSI target and it appears as a new datastore on your ESX server. I’ll show the operations you need to complete to create and format the datastore in the way your ESX server can create virtual machines on it.

I’m also going to show how the esxcli command can be used for PSA (pluggable storage architecture) management and explain how to use the vSphere Client to manage the PSA, the associated native multipathing plug‐in (NMP).

In this online training we’re going to take a look at the multi pathing policy, in this particular case we’re using round robin. For this setup, because multipathing plugins do not have direct access to physical NICs on your host, you first need to connect each physical NIC to a separate VMkernel port. You then associate all VMkernel ports with the software iSCSI initiator using a port binding technique. As a result, each VMkernel port connected to a separate NIC becomes a different path that the iSCSI storage stack.

http://www.starwindsoftware.com/iscsi-san-for-microsoft-windows-multipathing
http://www.starwindsoftware.com/download-free-trial

A great whiteboard presentation by fellow VMware Certified Instructor Bob King in which he discusses the disk processes behind both VMFS and RDM datastore access within a VMware infrastructure.

This hands-on training course introduces the use of VMware vSphere™ PowerCLI to automate VMware vSphere 4. This course demonstrates ways to automate tasks that can reduce your IT costs while improving efficiency, availability, flexibility, and manageability.

Objectives   

•  Automate VMware® ESX™ configuration
•  Automate the provisioning of virtual machines
•  Automate changes to virtual machine configuration
•  Automate cluster operations
•  Automate reporting
 
Who Should Attend?   

This course is designed for technical persons responsible for managing ESX, VMware ESXi, and VMware vCenter™ Server, including IT managers, system architects, and system administrators.
 
Prerequisites   

System administration experience on Microsoft Windows or Linux operating systems and completion of either the VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage or the VMware vSphere: Fast Track course. Also scripting experience in one of the following languages: VBScript, Perl, UNIX shell scripts, Python, or other languages with variables and control structures.

http://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrreg/courses.cfm?ui=www_edu&a=one&id_subject=19082