During this four-day course, you will gain the knowledge, skills, and tools to plan and deploy a VMware vSAN™ cluster. You will learn about managing and operating vSAN. This course focuses on building the required skills for common Day-2 vSAN administrator tasks such as vSAN node management, cluster maintenance, security operations, troubleshooting and advanced vSAN cluster operations. You will learn these skills through the completion of instructor-led activities and hands-on lab exercises.
Skills Gained
By the end of the course, you should be able to meet the following objectives:
- Describe vSAN concepts
- Detail the underlying vSAN architecture and components
- Explain the key features and use cases for vSAN
- Identify requirements and planning considerations for vSAN clusters
- Explain the importance vSAN node hardware compatibility
- Describe the different vSAN deployment options
- Explain how to configure vSAN fault domains
- Detail how to define and create a VM storage policy
- Discuss the impact of vSAN storage policy changes
- Detail vSAN resilience and data availability
- Describe vSAN storage space efficiency
- Explain how vSAN encryption works
- Detail VMware HCI Mesh™ technology and architecture
- Detail vSAN File Service architecture and configuration
- Describe how to setup a stretched and a two-node vSAN cluster
- Describe vSAN maintenance mode and data evacuation options
- Define the steps to shut down a vSAN cluster for maintenance
- Explain how to use proactive tests to check the integrity of a vSAN cluster
- Use VMware Skyline Health™ for monitoring vSAN health
- Use VMware Skyline Health to investigate and help determine failure conditions
- Discuss vSAN troubleshooting best practices • Describe vSAN Express Storage Architecture™ concepts
Who Can Benefit
- Storage and virtual infrastructure consultants, solution architects, and administrators who are responsible for production support and administration of VMware vSAN 8.
Prerequisites
Completion of the following course is required:
- VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage or equivalent knowledge
Course Modules
Course Introduction
- Introductions and course logistics
- Course objectives
Introduction to vSAN
- Describe vSAN
- Review different types of vSAN architectures
- Explore vSAN implementation types
- Distinguish different vSAN disk configurations
- Examine vSAN Storage Policies
Planning a vSAN Cluster
- Review vSAN requirements
- Understand factors for vSAN storage capacity
- planning
- Describe vSAN ReadyNode Sizer capabilities
Deploying a vSAN Cluster
- Describe vSAN cluster configuration types
- • Identify the steps involved in configuring a vSAN
- cluster
- Validate vSAN cluster configurations
- Explore Auto-Policy Management
- Configure vSAN Reserved Capacity
vSAN Storage Policies
- Recognize vSAN Objects and Components
- Explain storage policies integration with vSAN
- Compare different vSAN storage policies
- Explore vSAN ESA snapshots
- Examine Custom-Sized Namespace Objects
- Understand vSAN ESA storage policies
- Understand how the vSAN Storage Policies can be
- customized
- Review Configuration Changes and Impacts
vSAN Resilience and Data Availability
- Identify vSAN component states
- Explore how Fault Domains can protect against
- potential outages
- Analyze the vSAN response to different types of
- hardware failures
- Explore the vSAN response to different types of
- network partitions
- Explain how vSAN repairs objects after a failure
Managing vSAN Space Efficiency
- Explain the configuration steps of compression-only
- in vSAN OSA
- Discuss vSAN OSA’s deduplication and
- compression
- Review vSAN ESA’s compression capabilities
- Describe the steps to reclaim storage space with
- TRIM/UNMAP
vSAN Security Operations
- Understand how vSAN protects data on disk with
- Data-at-Rest Encryption
- Configure vSAN Data-at-Rest Encryption
- Describe the I/O flow from the Guest OS to
- encrypted data on disk
- Explore the ESXi host boot up process with
- encrypted disks
- Review the ESXi boot up process when encryption
- is activated
- Understand how new keys can be generated
- Explore how vSAN protects data in flight with Datain-Transit Encryption
vSAN Stretched and Two-Node Clusters
- Identify characteristics of vSAN stretched clusters
- Discuss the vSAN stretched cluster architecture and
- use cases
- Explain how read and write I/O management works
- in vSAN stretched clusters
- List networking requirements of vSAN stretched
- clusters
- Describe the purpose of the vSAN witness host
- Explain the Two-Node vSAN cluster architecture
- and use cases
- Describe the purpose of the vSAN shared witness
- appliance
vSAN Cross-Cluster Capacity Sharing
- Understand the purpose of Cross-Cluster Capacity
- Sharing
- Review three Cross-Cluster Capacity Sharing
- topologies
- Explore remote vSAN Datastore operations
vSAN File Service and iSCSI Target Service
- Understand the purpose of vSAN File Service
- Explore how to turn on and configure vSAN File
- Service
- Create and view a share and create a snapshot for a
- share
- Explore monitoring and performance of vSAN File
- Service
- Describe the vSAN iSCSI target service
- Discuss vSAN iSCSI target service networking
- Detail steps to configure the vSAN iSCSI target
- service
vSAN Cluster Maintenance
- Describe vSAN maintenance mode and data
- evacuation options
- Detail how to assess the vSAN maintenance mode
- precheck reports
- Define the steps to shut down a vSAN cluster for
- maintenance
- Describe vSAN cluster scaling
- Detail the removal and replacement of disks and
- disk groups in a vSAN cluster
- Detail the removal and replacement of a host in a
- vSAN cluster
- Describe stages in the vSAN upgrade process
- List the best practices to prepare for a vSAN
- upgrade
vSAN Cluster Monitoring
- Explore the PNOMA framework
- Understand how Skyline Health can identify issues
- Evaluate and perform proactive tests
- Examine the available performance charts
- Explore capacity monitoring and forecasting tools