VMware Training: Optimize and Troubleshoot


Course Delivery

Live Instructor-Led Training

Course Description

The course Optimize and Troubleshoot (VMware Training) teaches your how to deploy and troubleshoot a production vSphere environment. The course includes optimization strategies for virtual machines, ESXi hosts, the vCenter Server Appliance, networking and shared SAN storage with the aim of achieving performance and scalability. The training course also explores the details of performing an upgrade and includes coverage of common troubleshooting techniques that allow you to diagnose, isolate and fix common problems. You learn to use the entire VMware toolset to identify and resolve common performance bottlenecks and to support a top-tier virtualization infrastructure.

Course Dates and Pricing


Jan 6 - 10, 2025$3,500.00Feb 3 - 7, 2025$3,500.00Mar 3 - 7, 2025$3,500.00Apr 7 - 11, 2025$3,500.00May 5 - 9, 2025$3,500.00Jun 2 - 6, 2025$3,500.00Jul 7 - 11, 2025$3,500.00

Course Outline

Install, Configure and Secure ESXi 6.5

Install and configure ESXi 6.5 using Best Practices
Enable and secure command line access including the console and Secure Shell
Using Lockdown mode to restrict management access
Lockdown modes introduced in vSphere 6.5

Virtual and Physical Networking

Create / update standard Virtual Switches
vSwitch security policies
Network failure detection and beaconing
Enabling Discovery Protocol settings

Advanced Networking

Configuring vSwitch Security policies, Promiscuous Mode, Forged Transmits and MAC address changes
Understanding and using Traffic Shaping
The Five physical NIC teaming policies including their pros / cons and use cases
Enabling and using Jumbo Frames for improved performance and reduced protocol overhead
Troubleshoot networking configuration and performance issues

Connecting to and Using NAS Shared Storage

Connecting to NFS v3 storage
Network design for high service availability
Best practices for performance and reliability

Virtual Hardware and Virtual Machines

VM virtual hardware, options and limits
Creating and right-sizing Virtual Machines for CPU, memory
Installing VMware Tools
Virtual Machine best practices
Import and export VMs in Open Virtual Machine Format

vCenter Server Appliance and Web Client

Deploy vCenter Server Appliance 6.0 via the command line and configuration files
Upgrade vCenter Appliance 6.0 to vCenter Appliance 6.5
vCenter deployment and redundancy options
Connecting Single Sign On (SSO) to Active Directory and other identity sources

ESXi Command Line Access

Import and configure vSphere Management Assistant (vMA)
Using command line access tools including esxcli, vicfg, vmware-cmd
Introduction to ESXtop
Working with ESXi log files
Using command line tools to review and update configurations
Using command line tools to backup and restore an ESXi host’s configuration

VM Rapid Deployment using Templates, Clones

How to create a Template VM
Using Guest OS Customization for Windows and non-Windows OS
Enabling, using Hotplug Virtual CPU and memory
Enabling, using Hotplug disks, networking, USB devices and more
Predictive and adaptive sizing strategies for VMs
Troubleshooting Virtual Machine issues

Use VMware Update Manager to Upgrade ESXi hosts

Configure VMware Update Managers
Create ESXi host Patch Baselines
Importing a new ESXi install media image
Attaching a Host Upgrade patch baseline
Performing host compliance scans
Upgrading an ESXi host from ESXi 6.0 to ESXi 6.5

Connecting to Fibre and iSCSI Shared Storage

General SAN features and capabilities
Overview of Fibre Storage Networks
VMware APIs for Array Integration (VAAI)
Storage network design for performance and redundancy
Connecting to Fibre and iSCSI shared storage
iSCSI Hardware and Software Initiators
iSCSI Static and Send Targets LUN discovery
Troubleshooting storage issues

Direct VM to SAN Access with Raw Device Maps

Explain Physical and Virtual Raw Device Maps (RDMs)
Use cases for Raw Device Maps
How Raw Device Maps work with VM cold, VMotion and Storage VMotion migrations
Using RDMs to implement Virtual and Virtual/Physical Microsoft Fail Over Clusters

VMware File System (VMFS)

Unique file system properties of VMFS
Creating and managing shared Volumes
Managing VMFS capacity with LUN spanning and LUN expansion
Understand VMware multipath options
Benefits of using vendor multipath solutions
Understanding multipathing policies
VMFS performance, scalability and reliability considerations
Review storage queuing, I/O aborts and other storage issues
Diagnose and troubleshoot storage performance
VMware vSphere Flash Read Cache description and use cases
Troubleshooting VMFS issues

Storage Profiles

SAN and user defined storage profiles
Using storage speed, replication to define storage capabilities
VMware APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA)
Creating VM storage profiles
VM/Storage compliance checks
Remediating incorrectly placed VM
Understanding Storage I/O Control

Storage Load Balancing with SDRS Clusters

Creating and using Storage Distributed Resource Scheduling clusters (SDRS)
Cluster properties for capacity and I/O load balancing
Best practices for building storage clusters

VMotion Migration, Cold Migration, Storage VMotion

Cold Migrations to new ESXi hosts, datastores
Hot Migrations with VMotion
VMotion requirements and dependencies
How VMotion works – detailed explanation
Troubleshooting VMotion
Storage VMotion for hot VM disk migrations

DRS Load Balancing Clusters

Resource assignments including reservations, shares and limits
Resource balanced clusters with VMware Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS) clusters
Per-VM cluster policy overrides
Features and benefits of DRS Power Management
Troubleshooting DRS cluster issues
Predictive DRS

VMware High Availability Clusters

Minimize unplanned VM down time VMware High Availability clusters
VM requirements for HA Clusters
Storage fault recovery in High Availability clusters (All Paths Down, Permanent Device Loss)
Monitoring VM health in HA clusters
Admission Control policy settings for predictable pCPU/pRAM resource availability
Identifying and troubleshooting issues in VMware HA clusters

VMware Fault Tolerance

Eliminate VM unplanned down time with VMware Fault Tolerance
Role of the Primary and Secondary VM in a Fault Tolerance configuration
Explain how Fast Checkpointing keeps the Secondary VM vCPU, vRAM, vDisk up to date
Enabling VM Fault Tolerance
Initial VM synchronization
Testing Fault Tolerance

Distributed vSwitch Features and Scalability

Features and benefits of Distributed vSwitches
Role of the DVUplink port group
Adding ESXi hosts to dvSwitches
Creating dvSwitch port groups
Migrating physical NICs and VMkernel ports to dvSwitches
dvSwitch configuration backup and restore
Configuring custom VM MAC address generation policies
Testing dvSwitch network health

Managing Scalability and Performance

VMkernel CPU and memory resource management mechanisms
Tuning VM storage I/O performance
Identifying and resolving resource contention
Monitoring VM and ESXi host performance
Performance and capacity planning strategies

Course Locations

  • Ottawa

  • Montreal

  • Toronto

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