Remotely assisted instructional learning (
RAIL)
Instructor-led training (
ILT)
Onsite dedicated training (
OST)
Price
USD $1,700
CAD $1,700
*Courses are supported in the delivery formats above, but are not necessarily scheduled in every delivery format listed. Please click the schedule links at the top of the page to see which delivery formats are currently scheduled.
Special notes
Review the Course Prerequisites prior to registration.
Course overview
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. This course is 50% lecture, 20% hands-on labs, and 30% case studies.
Prerequisites
This course does not require prior vSphere knowledge
or experience.
This course assumes that you have:
Storage administration experience
User-level experience with Windows or UNIX/Linux systems
Audience
Storage administrators who support vSphere
Ways to save
Save with the HP Care Pack education service offerings
By the end of the course, you should understand storage
functionality in vSphere and be able to:
Explain basic concepts related to virtual computing, including vSphere server and storage virtualization
Be a cooperative partner with vSphere administrators to design, configure, manage, and troubleshoot storage in a vSphere environment
Describe the trade-offs between storage design decisions
Plan a storage architecture that scales to the demands of a virtualized environment
Use the VMware vSphere Client, esxtop, resxtop, and vscsiStats to monitor storage configuration end to end from a virtual machine disk to a specific VMware® vStorage VMFS datastore
Course outline
Module 1: Course Introduction
Introductions and course logistics
Course objectives
Module 2: Introduction to VMware Virtualization
Hypervisors (the VMkernel) and virtual machines
Benefits of server virtualization
Shared storage and the VMware features that depend on it
Supported storage configurations
Storage maximums
Introduce VMware storage virtualization stack
Module 3: VMware Storage Virtualization
Describe and create a VMFS datastore
Using extents and Volume Grow to enlarge a VMFS volume
Introduce strategies for avoiding SCSI reservation conflicts
Describe the importance of VMFS alignment
Describe trade-offs between VMFS and RDM
Options for creating virtual machine disks and the trade-offs of each option
VMware vStorage Thin Provisioning and its effect on storage
Explore the effects of using Thin Provisioning with storage array thin provisioning
Module 4: Storage Performance and Troubleshooting
Storage configuration and its effect on performance
vSphere utilities to monitor storage latency, capacity, and consumption
Troubleshooting storage performance problems
Module 5: SAN Design Considerations
Storage device names in vSphere
Importance of configuring consistent
host LUN ID numbering
Calculating I/O operations per second (IOPS) and megabytes per second (MBps) to properly configure LUNs
Using esxtop or resxtop to determine IOPS and MBps
Discuss storage network topologies, zoning, and access control in Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NAS
Strategies for virtual disk placement
Interswitch linking and trunking considerations
Using esxcli to mask LUNs
Implementing flow control and jumbo frames in IP storage configurations
Configuring VMware vStorage adaptive queueing
Manual configuration of storage queues
Discuss VMware ESX™/ESXi boot from SAN
Module 6: Multipathing Configuration and Management
Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NAS multipathing
Managing multipathing algorithms available in vSphere
Integrating virtual port and target port group support, and asymmetric logical unit access arrays into a vSphere environment
Configuring active-active and active-passive arrays with vSphere
Module 7: VMware vStorage VMFS and Virtual Machine Snapshots
LUN replication in a vSphere environment
Identifying a snapshot LUN in vSphere
Controlling how the VMkernel handles replicated LUNs
Using replicated LUNs for backup and disaster recovery
Introduce VMware APIs for Data Protection
Describe the impact of virtual machine snapshot use on storage architecture
Module 8: VMware vStorage APIs for Array Integration
Describe hardware-accelerated locking
Describe hardware-accelerated zeroing
Describe hardware-accelerated copy
Enable and disable hardware acceleration
Introduce new performance metrics added to esxtop and resxtop
