Clear and Simple VMware vSphere 6.5 Foundations VCP - Part 1

Compare vSphere licensing editions—standard, enterprise, and enterprise plus—highlighting features like fault tolerance, encryption, DRS, storage I/O control, and network I/O control, plus essentials licensing options.

Explore virtualization basics by defining virtual machines and type one hypervisors, showing how a shared ESX host allocates CPU, memory, network, and storage via a layer of abstraction.

Discover the new vCenter 6.5 features, including native vCenter HA with synchronous replication and witness quorum, native backup and restore, and HTML5 client with REST APIs.

Demonstrates deploying a new vCenter server appliance 6.5 with an embedded Platform Services Controller, configuring static IP, DNS, and FQDN, and completing the initial setup via the web interface.

Demonstrates assigning and applying license keys to vCenter and ESXi via the vSphere Web Client, resolving host disconnections and maintaining a clean license inventory.

Demonstrates installing ESXi 6.5 from an ISO image in a VMware Workstation VM, and configuring the direct console user interface and management network before adding the host to vCenter.

Explore basic ESXi configuration via the host client, covering auto start, NTP, licensing, services, authentication, user roles, lockdown mode, firewall rules, DNS, data stores, and VM management.

Share content libraries across vCenter instances by creating a library with templates, ISO images, and virtual appliances, then publish, subscribe, and synchronize datastores for identical collections.

Automates patching and upgrades for ESXi hosts, virtual machines, and appliances using dynamic and fixed baselines, a download source, and remediation, bundled in the vCenter server appliance.

Explore update manager on the vcenter server appliance to download latest patches, attach dynamic baselines to ESX hosts, scan for updates, troubleshoot DNS issues, and remediate by upgrading VM hardware.

Understand how virtual networking lets virtual machines communicate via virtual switches, port groups, and vmkernel ports, with vlan tagging and uplinks linking to physical networks.

Explore how vSphere standard switches balance VM traffic across multiple adapters using originating port ID, MAC address, and IP hash, with beacon probes, traffic shaping, and security controls.

Explore the vSphere distributed switch, its centralized management plane and data plane of hidden switches, and implement private VLANs, VLAN types, and route based on physical NIC load with LACP.

Compare standard and distributed virtual switches, and learn about Cisco discovery protocol, link layer discovery protocol, traffic filtering and tagging, network health check, NetFlow, and port mirroring.

Demonstrates creating an internal vSphere standard switch, assigning management VMkernel and a VM network, and configuring switch and port group settings with caution on migrations.

Learn how the maximum transmission unit affects network performance, why larger frames reduce frame count, and how mismatched MTU settings cause fragmentation and reassembly overhead.

Create a vSphere distributed switch, assign uplinks on two ESXi hosts, and migrate a VM from a standard port group to the distributed switch.

Explore the features of the vSphere distributed switch, including CDP and LDP discovery, link aggregation and private VLANs, net flow, port mirroring, and health check.

Explore how storage virtualization decouples virtual machines from physical hardware, and how the hypervisor directs storage to virtual disks, with thin versus thick provisioning and zeroing.

Explain VMFS and NFS datastores: LUNs are raw space that VMFS formats, while NFS uses a preexisting shared folder, and VMFS enables boot from SAN whereas NFS does not.

Compare NFS v3 and v4.1 to understand security upgrades, multi-pathing with a second IP, and Kerberos-based access, while noting v3 limitations like unencrypted traffic and root access requirements.

Demonstrates creating and mounting an NFS datastore across two ESXi hosts using a shared folder on an NFS server and maintains the same NFS version across hosts.

Learn how a vSphere host connects to a Fibre Channel storage array via switches and HBAs, using WWNs and LUNs to form data stores and multipathing for fault tolerance.

Explore Fibre Channel unmasking and how worldwide names determine which LUNs are presented to each host, with access types like read, write, and no access.

Explore zoning to segment fiber channel switch fabric, isolating production storage from development hosts. Create blue and green zones so only prod ESX hosts access the dedicated fiber channel array.

Explore fibre channel over ethernet storage, its architecture with storage arrays, raw device mappings, boot from SAN, converged network adapters, VLANs, LUNs, and redundancy with round robin load balancing.

Explore iSCSI storage concepts by examining the storage array, ethernet network, and storage processors. Learn how disk aggregates and LUNs create VM data stores for ESX hosts.

Illustrate how a software iSCSI initiator binds to a VMkernel port on a virtual switch and routes storage commands through a storage adapter to the storage array.

Explain how a dependent hardware iSCSI initiator connects a VM's iSCSI controller to physical storage adapter, and compare it with independent hardware iSCSI that uses Ethernet adapters to reduce overhead.

Explore how an independent hardware iSCSI initiator connects ESX hosts to storage over Ethernet, removing the need for software iSCSI and reducing host storage workload.

Configure the ESX host IP for iSCSI dynamic discovery, perform a rescan to reveal available LUNs, and create a VMFS datastore from unallocated LUNs while enabling CHAP authentication.

Learn how VMware vSAN uses local host storage to create a shared datastore in a cluster, enabling vmotion, high availability, and distributed resource scheduler with disc groups and SSD cache.

Set up a VSAN cluster of ESXi hosts with 10 gig networks and a VMkernel port for VSAN traffic, mirroring VM objects across hosts and leveraging a hybrid flash cache.

Create a new virtual machine from scratch in the vSphere web client, selecting host, data store, hardware version, and guest OS, then boot from an ISO to install.

Install VMware Tools on all virtual machines, enable automatic upgrades on reboot, and benefit from ISO image installation, console performance, drivers, memory ballooning, and soft shutdowns.

Demonstrates inflating a thin provisioned disk to a thick provisioned eager-zeroed disk in vSphere 6.5, illustrating space consumption, timing, and performance considerations for demanding workloads.

Learn to create a vApp in vSphere, drag and drop multiple VMs into the vApp, configure resource sharing and memory limits, and set startup order for a multi-tier app.

Create and manage templates by cloning a configured virtual machine, then deploy new virtual machines from the template using customization specs for unique computer names and domain joining.

Demonstrates cloning a virtual machine to another VM or template in vSphere 6.5, applies customization specs, adjusts hardware, and ensures unique names, IPs, and domain join.

Watch as you deploy a virtual appliance from an ovf or ova template to a host, select a datastore, configure networks, and handle vendor licensing.

Explain how snapshots capture memory and virtual disk state to create a point-in-time fallback, with a read-only original disk and a delta disk for short-term live changes.

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