Welcome to the VTSP Server Virtualization training and accreditation program.

Server
virtualization is driving the digital transformation.

It empowers digital workspaces, modernizes data centers, integrates public clouds, and
transforms security.

This accreditation program explains the fundamentals of server virtualization using vSphere,
and the hypervisors and virtual machines that vSphere provides a platform for.

This introductory module provides an overview of VTSP server virtualization and describes how
to complete the program.

Welcome to the VTSP Server Virtualization accreditation track! My name is Erik Collett, I’m a
partner solutions engineer supporting the VMware partner community.

When VMware entered the server virtualization market in 2001, building on the success of
VMware Workstation, nobody could have predicted where the innovation based on this
technology would lead.

Today, Server Virtualization accounts for all cloud-based workloads and nearly all on-premise
workloads.

Virtualization simplified the overhead of traditional IT by allowing application workloads to be

encapsulated in software, thus creating a virtual machine. Then, using the vSphere hypervisor,
numerous virtual machines could run on top of consolidated groups of powerful servers, called
hosts. This radically reduced the size of data centers, simplifying cooling requirements and
lowering the overall power consumption for some businesses by up to 90%.An evolving
byproduct of virtualization was a new approach to handle both data and uptime of application
environments. Grouping hosts into clusters maximized resilience of applications and gave the
ability to balance workloads over multiple hosts dynamically.In these courses, vSphere is the
number one focus: defining the relationship between itself, the applications, and the hardware
it utilizes. The functionality that is available through vSphere continues to evolve at a rapid
pace, encompassing much more comprehensive offerings around key requirements such as
networking, storage, and security.

vSphere continues to evolve with the focus on the software-defined enterprise, enabling much
of the technology that is foundational to Cloud Computing. In this course, you will learn about
new editions, like the new vSphere Platinum, that shows our continued dedication to
enhancing the security of your environment.vSphere allows organizations the flexibility in how
they'd build and deploy public and private clouds. Utilizing both, as a hybrid cloud, provides
mobile services to both employees and customers and allows for integration with third-party
products such as Amazon Web Services.These points of integration support the new and
evolving categories of Cloud Native workloads, like Big Data, while still supporting various x86
server Operating Systems that run a majority of businesses’ mission critical applications.The
larger the cloud deployment, the greater the need for a comprehensive management layer to
provide automation and operational support. These topics are covered in other courses, but, in
this course, we will take a look how they relate to vSphere.You will learn about some of these
features and tools in this course, but keep in mind that this technology segment is growing
exponentially.
As always, it is best to explore and discover on your own.So, whether this is your introduction
to server virtualization, or you are using this as a refresher covering recent innovations, I know
you’ll benefit from completing these courses.

Let’s get started!

Here are the courses that are included in VTSP Server Virtualization 2018, starting with this
introduction.

Here are the objectives for VTSP Server Virtualization 2018.

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Welcome to the Data Center Virtualization Fundamentals course.

This course provides a fundamental understanding of Data Center Virtualization products of

VMware.

The course also takes you through the components and features of vSphere 6.7 and shows
how the vSphere 6.7 product line helps resolve business and IT challenges commonly faced by
organizations.

This course covers a wide range of topics in its three modules: Introduction to Data Center
Virtualization with vSphere, Components of vSphere, and vSphere Solutions to Data Center
Challenges.

Module 1 introduces the concepts of Data Center Virtualization with focus on vSphere 6.7.

Module 2 provides an overview of the vSphere 6.7 product line, explaining its various
components and features.

Module 3 presents the common challenges faced by organizations and the solutions offered by
vSphere 6.7 to resolve those challenges.

Upon completion of this training, you will be able to:

• Identify the need for Data Center Virtualization• Describe the components and features of
vSphere 6.7

• Describe how VMware products help solve business and technical challenges with regard to
Data Center Virtualization

This module introduces Data Center Virtualization and related concepts.

It also introduces vSphere 6.7 as a VMware solution to implement Data Center Virtualization.

Customers are telling us that in 2018 they’ll focus on a core set of business outcomes:

• They want to accelerate business agility and innovation.

• Deliver exceptional mobile experiences.

• And of course, they want to protect their brand and customer trust.

VMware is helping customers achieve these business outcomes by delivering on customers’

strategic priorities which are modernize data centers, integrate public clouds, empower digital
workspaces, and transform security.

Integrated Architecture Vision ( 2 )

VMware offerings give our customers the flexibility they need now and, in the future,
to support their unique business journeys.

• They empower digital workspaces, to enable exceptional mobile experiences.

• They modernize data centers for infrastructure agility, security, and scalability t
o support business innovation and growth.

• They integrate public clouds to give developers “cloud freedom of choice” while ens
uring that their companies use those clouds as effectively as possible.
• And most critically, they transform security so that data, apps, devices, data cent
ers, and clouds are compliant and secure.

Cross-Cloud Architecture

VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture enhances data center and cloud agility, while
enabling the deployment of traditional, cloud-native, and Software as a Service or
SaaS apps, for rapid business innovation and time to market.

VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture is an extension of current cloud strategy of VMware,

which has always been to give customers the tools they need to manage workloads
securely across cloud platforms.

This means that irrespective of the cloud platform type - public, private, or hybrid,
or device, customers can run, manage, connect, and secure their applications in a
common operating environment.

It is designed to enable customers to “use any cloud to deliver any application on

any device”.

VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture is enabled by two new offerings: Cloud Foundation and
a set of Cross-Cloud Services that VMware is developing.

vRealize Suite cloud management platform and NSX are also key components of the
Cross-Cloud Architecture.
Virtualization Overview (1)

Virtualization is the process of creating virtual versions of physical components, such as

servers, storage devices, and network devices.

Virtualization serves as an effective way to reduce IT expenses while boosting efficiency and
agility - not just for large enterprises, but also for small and mid-sized businesses.

With virtualization, you can run multiple operating systems and applications on a single server
and consolidate hardware to get substantially higher productivity from fewer servers.

Key areas where virtualization is applied include server virtualization, network virtualization,
storage virtualization, application virtualization, and desktop virtualization.
Using server virtualization, multiple operating systems can run on a single physical server as
virtual machines, each with access to the underlying server's computing resources.

Each virtual machine in the host is unaware of the other virtual machines that exist within the
same host.

This means that if a virtual machine crashes, the other virtual machines are not
affected.Network virtualization is the complete reproduction of a physical network as
software.

Storage virtualization provides an abstraction layer for physical storage resources to be

managed and optimized in a virtualization deployment.

Application virtualization increases mobility of applications and allows migration to any server
in the environment, with minimal downtime, by decoupling the application and operating
system from the server hardware.

Delivering virtualized desktops and applications to branch offices, outsourced and offshore
employees, and mobile workers on iPad and Android tablets help reduce costs and increase
service.
The most pressing challenge faced by IT departments in organizations across the world is the
infrastructure sprawl that compels IT departments to channel 70% of their budget into
maintenance, which leaves scant resources for business-building innovation.

This difficulty stems from the architecture of today’s x86 servers. These servers are designed
to run just one operating system and application at a time.

As a result, even small data centers have to deploy many servers, each operating at just 5% to
15% of its capacity. It is highly inefficient by any standard.

Virtualization software solves the problem by enabling several operating systems and
applications to run on one physical server or host.
Each self-contained virtual machine is isolated from the others and uses as much of the host
computing resources as it requires.

Click each label to learn more about the benefits of Data Center Virtualization.
Data Center Virtualization

So, what is Data Center Virtualization? Let's take a look.

From a technical perspective, Data Center Virtualization is the conversion of the hardware
devices in a data center into software resources.

Consider your physical data center which typically includes a number of physical servers, along
with other networking, and storage devices.

These physical devices are expensive, consume a lot of space and power, and generate heat.

Also, hardware failures are always a potential threat and routine maintenance tasks, such as
redeployment and backups, are often time-consuming processes, requiring extensive
downtime.

Through Data Center Virtualization, you can consolidate your servers into fewer pieces of
hardware and effectively manage them using virtualized management platforms.
In a virtualized environment, each server's operating system and applications are separated
from the underlying hardware and placed on a hypervisor, which provides each virtual
machine access to the underlying physical resources.

This enables multiple virtual machines to access the same hardware.

Introduction to Virtual Machines

The heart of virtualization is the “virtual machine”, which is a software computer that, like a
physical computer, runs an operating system and applications.
The virtual machine consists of a set of specification and configuration files and is backed by
the physical resources of a host.

Every virtual machine has virtual devices that provide the same functionality as physical
hardware but are more portable, more secure, and easier to manage.

Virtual machines share the hardware of the physical server on which they are mounted. This
feature enables you to quickly replace or upgrade the virtual machine components.

Virtual machines allow you to add components, such as network cards and processors, without
rebooting the virtual machine, thereby reducing downtime.

You can install operating systems and applications in virtual machines in the same way as you
install programs on a physical server.

Applications running in virtual machines access CPU, memory, disk, and network resources
without directly accessing the underlying physical hardware.

Because each virtual machine is separate and independent, you can have many virtual
machines running simultaneously on a single host.

A thin layer of software, the Hypervisor, decouples the virtual machines from the host and
dynamically allocates computing resources to each virtual machine, as required.
Let's now look at the capabilities and benefits of virtual machines.

Virtual Machine Capabilities

Virtual machines can be used to host any application from file, database, email, and high-
performance application servers.

Organizations consider virtualization as a way to increase their availability, whether as a

protection scheme against common hardware failures or against complete, site-level disasters.
Virtual machines are easy to move, copy, and restore, so they make disaster recovery very
simple. Some organizations also look to virtualization as a means to provision new servers
quickly because it is impossible to create and deploy new virtual machines in just minutes.

Virtual machines provide capabilities that even physical machines can’t accomplish.

Think about the last time you applied a patch to a server only to find out that it caused data
loss or some other system instability.
In a virtual machine, a feature called “snapshots” allows you to capture the entire running
state of a virtual machine, from the contents of its hard disks to the state of its CPU and
memory.

If a patch or update causes a problem, you can easily revert to its original state without the
massive time investment of a full system restore.

Using a technique called “bare-metal backup,” you can take a complete image-based backup of
a virtual machine while it's running. Bare-metal backup allows you to restore the entire server
without the need to load a recovery operating system. Using this feature, you can also restore
individual files.
Virtual machines also allow you to hot-add virtual hardware. This means that, if your virtual
machine's operating system supports hot-add capability, you can increase the capabilities of a
virtual machine without re-starting it.

However, to decrease resources the virtual machine needs to be powered off.

Benefits of Using Virtual Machines

Organizations choose virtual machines because of the capabilities and benefits they p
rovide.
Here are three main benefits of using virtual machines.

Server Virtualization Use Cases

Let’s explore some of the use cases of Server Virtualization and discover the new
features of vSphere 6.7.

Virtualization is a proven software technology that makes it possible to run multiple

operating systems and applications on the same server at the same time.

Virtualization can increase IT agility, flexibility, and scalability while creating

significant cost savings. Workloads get deployed faster, performance and availability
increase and operations become automated, resulting in IT that's simpler to manage
and less costly to own and operate.
vSphere powers server virtualization, enabling many use cases. It helps you get the
best performance, availability, and efficiency from your infrastructure and
applications.

It’s the ideal foundation for any cloud environment. Click each use case to learn
more.

Self-Driving Operations Use Cases

The management capabilities of vSphere 6.7, when combined with vRealize Operations
and vRealize Automation, allow users to define their business and operational intent,
then use this guidance to automate the data center.

This functionality is collectively referred to as self-driving operations.

vRealize Operations verifies the current performance of the workloads against the
intent and is enabled to take automated actions to balance workloads and right size
virtual machines.

You also have initial placement integration between vRealize Automation and vRealize
Operations where intent, as well as analytics from the operations, help inform
optimal decisions for initial placement.
What VMware is delivering to organizations is continuous performance optimization,
helping them to become as efficient as their public clouds where they can get optimal
densification as well as proactive planning and procurement.

Finally, analytics provide the ability to predict and prevent issues before they
occur, and if a problem occurs they can always “take the steering wheel back” and
manually troubleshoot across issues.

The result is an optimized cloud environment where costs and wasted resources are
minimized, and unplanned downtime is prevented.
Hypérvisors

So, where can you create virtual machines?

A hypervisor provides the virtual hardware and an appropriate share of physical

resources on which you can create virtual machines.
It is managed by vCenter Server, the vSphere management tool, and is installed on the
server to allow multiple, unique, and isolated virtual machines to run on the same
physical server.

There are two types of hypervisors:

• Bare-metal

• Hosted

ESXi Hypervisor

ESXi is a bare-metal hypervisor that performs resource management while directly

accessing the underlying physical hardware.

It improves resource efficiency because of low operating system overhead.

Also, the stability of the ESXi hypervisor is not dependent on another operating
system.
ESXi hosts your virtual machines and provides some basic management functions to help
you deploy and control your virtual machines.

ESXi is commonly installed directly on hard drives of the physical server, but you
can also install it in flash drives, SD cards, and USB drives.

You can also network-boot the ESXi host using traditional boot from network tools
such as Protocol Execution Environment or PXE and Trivial File Transfer Protocol or
TFTP servers.
vSphere 6.7: An Efficient and Secure Platform for Hybrid Cloud

vSphere 6.7 is the next-generation infrastructure for next-generation applications.

It provides a powerful, flexible, and secure foundation for business agility that
accelerates the digital transformation to cloud computing and promotes success in the
digital economy.

vSphere 6.7 supports both existing and next-generation apps through its simplified
customer experience for automation and management at scale; comprehensive built-in
security for protecting data, infrastructure, and access along with universal
application platform for running any app, anywhere.

With vSphere 6.7, customers can now run, manage, connect, and secure their
applications in a common operating environment, across clouds and devices.

vSphere 6.7 provides a highly available, resilient, on-demand infrastructure that is

the ideal foundation of any cloud environment.

As the ideal platform for apps, cloud, and business, vSphere 6.7 reinforces the
customer’s investment in VMware.

vSphere 6.7 is one of the core components of software-defined data center of VMware
and a fundamental building block for cloud strategy of VMware.
It also helps free up time, so you can focus on more strategic tasks by safely
automating workload placement and resource optimization on your terms, with increased
control based on pre-set, customizable templates.

vSphere Editions

vSphere 6.7 is available in three different editions-Standard, Enterprise Plus, and

Platinum.

A previously available version of vSphere and vSphere with Operations Management, is

being discontinued as of late 2018.

Customers who want the add-on functionality associated with this version must migrate
to the combination of vSphere Enterprise Plus with vRealize Operations.
Benefits of vSphere 6.7

Let's look at some of the benefits of using vSphere 6.7.

As the ideal platform for apps, cloud, and business, vSphere 6.7 reinforces the
investment in VMware that organizations make.

vSphere 6.7 is one of the core components of the VMware Software-Defined Data Center
and is a fundamental building block for the VMware cloud strategy.

With vSphere 6.7, customers can now run, manage, connect, and secure their
applications in a common operating environment, across clouds and devices.

vSphere 6.7 helps organizations address several challenges by simplifying the

customer experience with management at scale, providing comprehensive built-in
security to secure from threats to critical apps and providing a universal
application platform that is required to run any application on any cloud.

vSphere 6.7 also delivers a seamless hybrid cloud experience.

Hybrid linked mode provides a single pane of management for unified visibility across
on-premises and hybrid cloud workloads.

As we progress through this course, we will go over the key features and components
of vSphere 6.7 and see how they help organizations resolve business challenges.

vSphere 6.7 Enhancements

vSphere 6.7 supports all aspects of enterprise readiness and introduces important new
features and enhancements.
vSphere 6.7 Update 1

vSphere 6.7 Update 1 includes a number of significant enhancements that demonstrate t

he commitment that VMware has to continually advancing software -
defined data center technology.

These enhancements include a feature -

complete HTML5 vSphere client, additional support for NVIDIA vGPU powered virtual mac
hines, the new vCenter Server Convergence Tool, enhancements to vSAN, and HCI capabil
ities, and improvements to the vSphere Content Library.
Update 1 is the foundation for vSphere Platinum, which incorporates a number of advan
ced security features.

Let’s take a closer look at the update 1 enhancements before examining the security a
dvantages of vSphere Platinum.

vSphere 6.7 Update 1 Highlights

vSphere 6.7 Update 1 supports all aspects of enterprise readiness and introduces impo
rtant new features and enhancements.

It also provides a direct upgrade path from vSphere 6.5 Update 2 to vSphere 6.7 Updat
e 1.
vSphere Platinum Security Features

Security must be built into IT architecture across the environment to achieve maximum
effectiveness.
Traditional defenses such as anti-virus products are slow to react and are resource
heavy.

Ultimately, Security Officers and their organizations are faced with two main
challenges.

They are faced with missing undetected threats or wasting time manually in
investigating alerts that turn out to be false alarms.

As customers continue to build and deploy applications more quickly, application

security is struggling to keep pace.

In fact, the inability to guarantee application security is generally seen as an

obstacle to innovation.

The existing options available to customers haven’t fully addressed these security
challenges until now, with the release of vSphere Platinum.

vSphere Platinum Overview

vSphere Platinum is a new version of vSphere that is fully integrated with VMware
AppDefense.

AppDefense is delivered through a SaaS model with on-premise components.

vSphere Platinum provides the highest level of security available for all workloads.

The security architecture fully leverages hypervisor architecture to minimize the

potential attack surface and incorporates machine learning to adjust the environment
over time.

vSphere Platinum uses a wide range of proven and operationally simple protocols,
which are efficient and therefore have minimal impact on performance.

One of the protocols used is establishment of a “known good state” to establish

baseline parameters.
Baselines are used to identify when security issues arise and provide a path back to
a known good state after a breach.

The security framework supports collaboration between IT teams by providing a

transparent design model.

vSphere Platinum Architecture

vSphere Platinum employs an architecture based on proven security protocols that

define various security considerations, such as encryption for data in motion and at
rest, enhancing operating system security, and securing boot processes.

These protocols allow security professionals to work together to secure the

environment.

If we take a look at the key challenges that Chief Information Security Officers, or
CISOs, and their organizations face, we can map the use cases.

AppDefense solves these challenges directly. The CISO’s organization is split into
Security Architects and Security Operations.

Security Architects are responsible for devising the policies used to secure
applications.
Security Operations is responsible for monitoring the environment and identifying
threats.Security Architects review new applications and determine how they should be
secured.

Today, they have very little insight into how apps are composed - which processes
should or should not be running, and how they should be communicating.

They often don’t even know who to go to for answers to their questions.

The review process can take months, and the policies they use are generic and focus
on ensuring the app is patched and the logs are monitored.

With AppDefense, Security Architects get an authoritative manifest of the

application’s intended state and behavior, allowing them to define app-centric
policies.

Once a new app is deployed, Security Operations is responsible for detecting when it
is compromised.

In a typical data center, Security Operations is bombarded with false positives and
noise.

If they do find an issue, remediation is manual and labor intensive.

With AppDefense, Security Operations can determine if an alert is legitimate, and

automate the remediation actions so that the threat is neutralized quickly and
efficiently.

AppDefense Security Model

The AppDefense security model starts with capturing the intended purpose, state, and
behavior of your virtual machines.

Here we are leveraging a unique property of vSphere — application visibility.

The hypervisor is in a unique position to see both the runtime state and the
provisioned state.
Thus, it can constantly compare what is currently running versus what was originally
provisioned.

From inside the vSphere hypervisor, AppDefense has an authoritative understanding of

how data center endpoints are meant to behave, based on analysis of the baseline data
that is captured in its manifest files.

This contextual intelligence removes the guesswork involved in determining which

changes are legitimate and which are real threats.Any anomalies that deviate from the
known good manifest are detected to be acted upon.

Since AppDefense knows how the application should be functioning, the attack surface
is very narrow, and it is easier to detect anomalies and deviations, and to determine
whether or not the anomalies represent malicious activity.

AppDefense is focused on “ensuring good” versus “chasing bad” on data center

endpoints.

When attention is focused on what a workload is supposed to be doing, the lens for
detecting malicious activity is much more focused.
Benefits for infrastructure Management Teams

VMware AppDefense simplifies the challenges faced by Infrastructure Management teams

by reducing the dependence on infrastructure-based rule sets while focusing on
application behaviors.

Thus, the emphasis is shifted to guarding the applications rather than the underlying
infrastructure.This model is well-suited to modern enterprise applications.

These applications are typically distributed and use shared dynamic resources.

For example, a modern application is often deployed in a virtual machine provisioned

from a pool of shared resources within the infrastructure.

AppDefense identifies the hardware and software elements used by each application. It
views those elements as a collective entity and then implements defenses around that
collection of elements.

More importantly, the defenses must adapt as the application changes, such as
movement of the workloads to adjust server load.

AppDefense provides useful charts and data directly in vSphere client that provide
shared visibility and context to Infrastructure Management teams.

vSphere Platinum Benefits for Security Teams

vSphere Platinum provides Security teams with a wide range of tools to achieve their
goals.

By helping security teams define baseline behaviors, it provides visibility and

situational awareness of application behaviors and virtual machine purpose.

This results in quicker detection, analysis, and time to response.

The contextual visibility and alerts provided by vSphere Platinum enhance existing
security tools and support compliance efforts through contextual visibility.

Integrated behavioral analytics and machine learning offer a more precise method to
identify and respond to threats, lowering the number of false alarms.

Big data correlation algorithms also support more accurate threat identification and
context using a cloud SaaS model.

vSphere Platinum supports DevOps through the ability to foster continuous learning
and protection.

The security protocols make it easier for Security teams to coordinate their efforts
with vSphere Admins and Application teams, while respecting existing workflows and
maintaining appropriate separation of duties.

vSphere 6.7 Overview

vSphere 6.7 is the next gen infrastructure for next gen apps, fueling digital
transformation and success in the digital economy.
vSphere 6.7 supports both existing and next-gen apps by providing a simplified
customer experience, a comprehensive built-in security, and a universal app platform.

vSphere consists of the following component layers:vCenter Server provides a single

point of control for the vSphere data center.

It provides essential data center services such as access control, performance

monitoring, and configuration.

Infrastructure Services are the set of services provided to abstract, aggregate, and
allocate hardware or infrastructure resources. Infrastructure Services can be
categorized into compute, storage, and network.

Application Services are the set of services provided to ensure availability,

security, and scalability of applications. Examples of application services include
HA and vSphere vMotion.

vSphere Client and vSphere Web Client are the interfaces that allow users to
communicate with the vSphere data center.

Before discussing the component layers in detail, let’s look at how these component
layers make up the architecture of vSphere 6.7.

Data Center Challenges

Using vSphere 6.7 for data center virtualization and consolidation, you can transform
your data center into a flexible cloud infrastructure with the performance and relia
bility to run the most demanding applications.

Data Center Virtualization enables you to overcome challenges that organizations, irr
espective of their size, typically face with respect to:

• Availability

• Scalability

• Optimization

• Management

• Application Upgrade
• Cloud

Let's look at each of these challenges and understand how vSphere is uniquely positio
ned to help solve the challenges in each of these areas.

Availability Challenges

North Star Bank is considering Data Center Virtualization to deal with the challenges
they face in their operations.

However, Mark, who is in-charge of North Star’s IT operations, does not know which
products and features will help them the most.

Mark invites Ben, the area sales manager of VMware, to discuss the availability
challenges that the technical team of North Star bank face.

Let's join the discussion.

Mark: Hi Ben, good morning!

Ben: Hello, good morning! How can I help you?

Mark: Well Ben, as you know, we are a mid-sized corporate bank.

Apart from typical banking operations, we also host and manage critical applications
for several of our financial clients.

These applications are accessed by our clients around the clock and should ideally
have no downtime at all.

Our existing infrastructure is proving very inadequate, especially regarding downtime

requirements.

We need a solution that will help us avoid extended downtime, if any, because of
application failure during the remediation process.

Would vSphere be an effective solution to address this problem?

Ben: Yes, definitely.

vSphere 6.7 includes two features-vSphere Fault Tolerance and vSphere HA-designed to
address challenges just like yours.

Fault Tolerance provides continuous availability for virtual machines by creating and
maintaining a secondary virtual machine that is identical to the primary machine and
is continuously available to replace the primary virtual machine in the event of a
failover.
High availability delivers the availability required by most applications running in
virtual machines, independent of the operating system and applications running in it.

High availability provides uniform, cost-effective failover protection against

hardware and operating system outages within your virtualized IT environment.

Mark: HA sounds great, but is there a way to proactively predict when a hardware
failure will occur, rather than waiting for one to happen?

Ben: Yes, absolutely.

vSphere 6.7 includes Proactive HA that integrates with select hardware partners to
detect degraded components and evacuate VMs from affected vSphere hosts before an
incident causes a service interruption.
Mark: That sounds great, thanks Ben.

Historically we have encountered issues with disparate management software and

applications, all of which provide different management functions with certain
incompatibilities between systems.

These applications have suffered from several outages and we are worried that,
whenever an application becomes unresponsive, we will not be able to recover it from
an outage.

They are not the easiest applications to backup and restore due to several large
databases.

We’re not keen on deploying another separate management system into our environment,
which may introduce more risk.

Ben: I understand.

vSphere 6.7 offers a single management control center that is the core of vSphere 6.7
called vCenter Server appliance.

HA is built right into the appliance.

Using an Active/Passive/Witness architecture to eliminate a single point of failure,
it can provide a 5-minute RTO.

This HA capability is available out of the box and has no dependency on shared
storage, RDMs, or external databases.

vCenter Server Appliance also comes with native backup and restore capabilities to
allow for simple out-of-the-box backup options.

Mark: Thanks,

Ben! Looks like vSphere can solve all my availability problems.Let me discuss this
internally and come back to you.

Ben: You're welcome,

Mark! I look forward to hearing from you.

Scalability Challenges

Global Investments Inc. manages the database for mutual fund and insurance companies.

Their primary focus is to manage customer accounts and protect customer information.
The key members of the IT team of Global Investments Inc. have gathered for a meeting
with Andy, the IT Manager.

Andy: Good morning, everyone! As you know, we have been asked to drastically cut our
IT expenditure for the current fiscal year and I wanted to see if you had any
thoughts about how we should do this.

One option that I propose is to employ the sparsely used resources in our disaster
recovery site. How can we move the virtual machines across data centers without too
much downtime?
Peter: We could upgrade to vSphere 6.7 and leverage the Long Distance vSphere vMotion
feature. I’ve been reading about this.

It allows migration of virtual machines across distances of up to 150 milliseconds

RTT.

Andy: That sounds impressive.

Tom: But Andy, what about our plans to move to the new office and expand our server
infrastructure?

You know we have to deploy several new applications across departments and we have
already reached maximum limit of hosts per cluster.

Surely, the new infrastructure will mean additional expense.

Peter: If we upgrade to vSphere 6.7, it will solve this problem too.

With vSphere 6.7 we can have 64 hosts per cluster, which is double the number of
hosts that we currently have!

Andy: Alright! So, it looks like we should upgrade to vSphere 6.7. Peter, can you
work out the financials for the upgrade and get back to me?

Peter: Will do, Andy.

Andy: Thanks, everyone!

Management Challenges

First State Corporation is an FMCG company, which involves large number of

intermediaries in the form of suppliers, distributors, and retailers worldwide.

Therefore, the logistics applications required by the company are hosted at various
locations.
As their virtual infrastructure is spread across the globe, they are facing
management challenges with respect to licensing and maintaining repositories.

Charles, the IT Manager at First State Corporation, chats online with a VMware
Technical Support representative about the management challenges faced by his
organization.

VMware Tech Support: Hello! Thank you for contacting VMware Tech support.

How can I help you today?

Charles: Hi! I am in-charge of the IT department at First State Corporation.

The repositories of our company are spread across the country.

Also, different versions of files, OVF templates, and ISO images used for deployment
are available on different vCenter servers.

They are currently being managed using various third-party software and FTP servers.
This is turning out to be very cumbersome.

Is there a way to simplify file management?

VMware Tech Support: Before we get into the solution for your problem, may I know
which version of vSphere do you have?

Charles: We have version 5.5. However, we are looking to upgrade to vSphere 6.7.
VMware Tech Support: Great! The Content Library feature in vSphere 6.7 can store OVF
templates, ISOs, or any other file type in a centralized location.

This allows other content libraries to subscribe to and download these files when
required.

It also keeps content up to date by periodically synchronizing with the publisher,

which ensures that the latest version is available.

Administrators can mount an ISO directly from the Content Library, apply a guest OS
customization specification during VM deployment, and update existing templates.
Because Content Library is part of vCenter Server, it leverages the new features
included with vCenter Server 6.7, including vCenter HA and vSphere 6.7 Backup/Restore
Service offered by vCenter Server Appliance.

Charles: Alright, thanks.

VMware Tech Support: Is there anything else I can assist you with?

Charles: Actually yes. I have another question.

We currently utilize vCenter Server 5.5 installed in Windows 2008 to manage our
vSphere Environment. We also have a separate server running VMware Update Manager. We
want to reduce our reliance on these systems to reduce server and license costs and
minimize the amount of patching required to the underlying operating system. How can

this be achieved?
VMware Tech Support: If you upgrade to vSphere 6.7, you can take advantage of the new
vCenter Server Appliance.

This release surpasses the feature-set of its windows predecessor. The installer has
been overhauled and migrating from Windows has never been easier. It also comes with
Update Manager built in, as well as native high availability and native backup and
restore capabilities. It’s also easier to manage than ever before and, as the vCSA
stack is owned by VMware, there is no more dependency on a third-party for OS
patching.

Charles: That's great.

VMware Tech Support: Do you have any other questions? Charles: Not at this point.

Thanks a bunch!

VMware Tech Support: You're welcome. Have a great day and thanks for calling VMware
support.

Optimization Challenges

FinCorp Bank is acquiring Pegasus Bank in the coming quarter.

Pegasus Bank has a physical IT infrastructure, while FinCorp Bank has a virtual one.

After the acquisition, FinCorp Bank will require a solution that can manage both
virtual and physical infrastructure simultaneously.

Janet, the Technology Head at FinCorp Bank, writes to Larry, the IT Manager, who
recently attended the VMware conference, asking how FinCorp Bank can optimize their
IT infrastructure in this situation.
Application Upgrade Challenges

SkySoft Solutions create and test a varied and increasing number of applications in-
house.

vSphere operations teams spend a large amount of time getting apps ready to run in
production while development teams spend decreasing amounts of time on application
logic.
Each application upgrade requires this process to be repeated. Development teams are
constantly waiting for IT Ops to build a virtual machine, before being able to test
and add the upgrades to their applications.

vSphere operations teams are unable to cope with the increasing demand for a wide
range of virtual machine builds, while development teams increasingly turn to using
containers on their laptops to simplify their own development and testing procedures.

So, what did SkySoft do?

SkySoft introduced vSphere 6.7.

vSphere 6.7 delivers vSphere Integrated Containers, the easiest way for vSphere users
to bring containers into an existing vSphere environment.

vSphere 6.7 is a universal application platform that supports both traditional and
next-generation apps. vSphere Integrated Containers helped SkySoft transform their
business with containers without re-architecting their existing infrastructure.

Cloud Challenges

Steve O'Brian works for a chain of global hotels as an IT Director.

The regional VP has tasked him and his team to find a solution that will be able to
handle the launch of a global reservation system app.

Their entire industry is changing, driven by rapid changes in customer expectations.

The company’s current environment makes this very complex.
They have dozens of back-end systems and more than one cloud.

The global reservation system app has to work seamlessly with all of them.

At this scale, they face issues such as data sovereignty where customers’ data is
moving across borders.

They also have to deal with privacy and security issues. The company currently uses
public and private clouds across the globe.

The app must be able to access them securely, on any device and anywhere. The company
asked Steve to research the cloud-based solutions available with VMware.

A week later Steve came back with the following report. The team at VMware quickly
realized that building the application and managing the clouds are two parts of the
same task.

Based on this, the account team recommended that Steve and his team selects VMware
Cross Cloud Architecture, which provides the following benefits:

• vSphere 6.7 can run any apps from any cloud, including data center or in public
cloud environments

• vSphere 6.7 is the heart of the Software-Defined Data Center, and the foundation of
cloud strategy of VMware

• It has a common operating environment, which will allow them to manage apps across
clouds and devices, all of which are invisible to the customer

• vSphere 6.7 natively supports intelligent workload placement for resource

optimization, security, and availability

• App developers and lines of business can leverage public cloud speed, agility, and
cost optimization while protecting the business with enterprise-level governance,
security, and compliance

• IT can help eliminate silos with consistent skills, policies, tools, and
visibility• Customers can easily access apps-no matter where they're running

Thank You!

Having completed this training, you should now be able to:

• Identify the need for Data Center Virtualization

• Describe the components and features of vSphere 6.7

• Describe how VMware products help solve business and technical challenges with
regard to Data Center Virtualization