About this Course

This hands-on training workshop provides you with the advanced knowledge, skills, and abilities to achieve competence in troubleshooting the VMware vSphere® environment. This workshop also increases your skill and competence in using the command-line interface to analyze problems. The workshop is based on VMware® ESXi™ 5.5 and VMware® vCenter Server™ 5.5.
To learn more about vSphere administration, go to http://www.vmware.com/education for other course options.

Audience Profile

• System administrators
• System integrators

At Course Completion

By the end of the course, you should gain an understanding of the functionality in vSphere 5.5 and be able to meet the following objectives:

• Use the VMware vSphere® Web Client, the command-line interface, and log files to diagnose and correct problems in vSphere
• Configure SSL certificates
• Troubleshoot networking issues
• Troubleshoot storage issues
• Troubleshoot vCenter Server issues
• Troubleshoot ESXi host issues
• Troubleshoot vSphere cluster issues
• Troubleshoot VMware vSphere® vMotion® issues
• Troubleshoot virtual machine issues

Prerequisites

Required prerequisites include completion of one of the following:

• VMware Certified Professional 5 – Data  Center Virtualization (VCP5-DCV)
• VMware vSphere: Fast Track [V5.1]
• VMware vSphere: Optimize and Scale [V5.1]
• Equivalent knowledge and administration experience with ESXi and vCenter Server
• Experience working with a command-line interface is highly recommended.

Course Outline

Module 1: Course Introduction

• Understand the course objectives
• Understand the scope and topics covered by the course
• Become familiar with online technical resources
• Become familiar with the VMware education system and certification tracks

Module 2: Introduction to Troubleshooting

• Identify the effects of a system problem
• Define the troubleshooting scope
• Use a structured approach
• Understand the troubleshooting principles
• Follow a logical troubleshooting procedure
• Troubleshooting examples

Module 3: Troubleshooting Tools

• Use command-line tools to identify and troubleshoot problems
• Use VMware vSphere Management Assistant
• Find and interpret important log files
• Export relevant log files for technical support
• Use vRealize Log Insight for log aggregation and problem analysis
• Use vRealize Log Insight for efficient log search

Module 4: Networking

• Identify the symptoms of network-related problems
• Analyze and resolve standard and distributed switch issues
• Analyze virtual machine connectivity issues and restore them
• Examine common management network connectivity issues and restore configurations
• Identify and prevent potential problems

Module 5: Storage

• Troubleshoot storage (iSCSI, NFS, VMware vSphere VMFS, and VMware Virtual SAN) connectivity problems
• Analyze hardware malfunction and software misconfiguration scenarios
• Identify multipathing related issues, including PDL and APD
• Analyze possible causes, recover from the faulty conditions, and restore storage visibility

Module 6: vSphere Clusters

• Identify and recover from issues related to vSphere HA
• Analyze and troubleshoot various types of vSphere vMotion issues related to virtual machine migrations
• Discuss and recover from vSphere DRS problems to achieve proper function and balanced resource use
• Examine vSphere cluster failure scenarios and possible solutions

Module 7: vCenter Server and ESXi

• Understand the vCenter Server and VMware Platform Services Controller architecture in vSphere 6
• Identify and resolve authentication issues
• Troubleshoot VMware Certificate Authority and certificate store issues
• Analyze and fix vCenter Server services issues
• Examine ESXi host and vCenter Server failure scenarios and resolve the issues

Module 8: Virtual Machines

• Analyze and resolve common virtual machine snapshot issues
• Identify possible causes and resolve virtual machine power-on issues
• Troubleshoot virtual machine connection state issues
• Resolve problems seen during VMware Tools installations
• Examine failure scenarios and provide solutions