vSphere Training (Advanced-level)

Global Knowledge UK run the full set of vSphere curriculum courses, including the advanced-level courses detailed below. The advanced-level coruses are designed to follow-on from the VCP4-level foundation courses, and also help to prepare an individual for the VCAP4-DCA, VCAP4-DCD, and VCDX4-DCD certification exams.

vSphere: Manage for Performance - 3 days - VSMP
If you want to know how to maximise performance in a vSphere environment, this is the course for you! We go “under the bonnet” and discuss all the elements that can affect performance, you’ll learn all the key resource metrics, and how to optimise host and guest configurations and the underlying infrastructure to get your virtualized applications running at maximum warp!

vSphere: Troubleshooting - 4 days - VST
Are you up to the challenge of problem-solving a huge variety of system and configuration issues on a broken vSphere system? Once you’ve learned about the key troubleshooting resources and techniques, your instructor will introduce fault after fault on your lab systems - and it’s down to you to fix them!

vSphere: Design Workshop - 3 days - VSD
Those who work in a pre or post-sales role, or are otherwise involved in designing/architecting deployments of vSphere are the perfect target audience for this workshop. We cover all the elements that comprise a successful vSphere 4 design, and a case study allows you to apply the skills and knowledge gained.

VMware will complete the set of advanced-level courses in the summer of 2010 with the release of the security and automation courses.

vSphere: Manage and Design for Security - 2 days - VSMDS
This course will cover all the best practices for secure design, deployment and operations of a vSphere environment. Currently in development, this will be a 2-day course with roughly 40% being hands-on lab time. The course objectives are:

- Identify vulnerabilities in the current design of a vSphere environment and recommend corrective actions
- Harden vSphere components as described in the security hardening guides for vSphere 4
- Use VMware vShield Zones to provide firewall protection to virtual machines and monitor virtual machine network traffic
- Recommend configuration and change management policies, processes, and systems

vSphere: Automation with vSphere PowerCLI - 2 days - VSA
This new course will give administrators an introduction to the vSphere PowerCLI and show them how to use it to perform a variety of different tasks in a vSphere environment:

- Automate VMware® ESX™ configuration
- Automate the provisioning of virtual machines
- Automate changes to virtual machine configuration
- Automate cluster operations
- Automate reporting

vSphere PowerCLI is an extension to Microsoft PowerShell, and contains over 100 VMware-specific commands (or cmd-lets in the language of PowerShell) - the course is currently in development and is due to be 2 days long with roughly 60% of the time spent doing hands-on labs with PowerCLI.