Chapter 1, Evolution to vSphere 6.7, provides a general overview of all the products, solutions, and features of the vSphere 6.7 suite, comparing 6.7 with previous releases. This chapter will explain why you should choose (and why you should not choose, in some cases) vSphere 6.7 over previous versions or other products. Also, it will briefly describe the different editions and licenses of vSphere.
Chapter 2, Designing and Planning a Virtualization Infrastructure, describes how to plan a virtualization project and build proper infrastructure by providing an approach both for planning and design.
Chapter 3, Analysis and Assessment of Existing Environments, explains how to analyze and assess an existing physical or virtual environment in order to gain data that's useful for planning your migration, upgrade, or improvement. Different tools and approaches are described as a way of reaching this goal.
Chapter 4, Deployment Workflow and Component Installation, starts by explaining the components of vSphere and the roles and services they provide. We will walk through the main aspects to consider in terms of the preparation of a deployment plan for your environment, analyzing the criteria for hardware platform selection, storage, and network requirements.
Chapter 5, Configuring and Managing vSphere 6.7, describes the different ways to manage a vSphere 6.7 infrastructure, including the new HTML5 clients, and also contains an introduction to the scripting and automation tools. ESXi, vCenter, VMware cluster-related configuration, and management topics are covered in this chapter.
Chapter 6, Life Cycle Management, Patching, and Upgrading, looks at how, with vSphere 6.7, administrators will find significantly more powerful capabilities for patching, upgrading, and managing the configuration of the virtual environment using the Update Manager and Host Profile features. We also cover the upgrade path and considerations to make regarding upgrading or migrating your virtual environment.
Chapter 7, Managing Networking Resources, is dedicated to virtual networking, both with standard and distributed virtual switches, and covers the design, management, and optimization of a virtual network in a vSphere environment.
Chapter 8, Managing Storage Resources, details the storage aspect of a virtual infrastructure, starting from local block-based storage and extending into shared block storage with Fibre Channel (FC), FC over Ethernet (FCoE), internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) protocols, and NFS-based NAS storage.
Chapter 9, VM Deployment and Management, introduces the practices and procedures involved in deploying, configuring, and managing Virtual Machines (VMs) in a vSphere infrastructure. Different types of VM provisioning are considered, including use of templates, the content library, and OVF.
Chapter 10, VM Resource Management, provides a comprehensive view of vSphere resources management, including reservations, limits, and shares, and how to balance and optimize them in your environment. Finally, we will discuss different migration techniques for moving your workload across different environments.
Chapter 11, Availability and Disaster Recovery, focuses on specific availability (and resiliency) solutions in vSphere, including the new vSphere High Availability (HA) features, proactive HA, vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT), and other solutions, such as guest clustering.
Chapter 12, Securing and Protecting Your Environment, looks at how security has become a critical part of any implementation, including virtual environments. In addition to the security and hardening aspects of vSphere, the new 6.7 version brings other important related features (though some were introduced with version 6.5), such as VM encryption, encrypted vMotion, secure boot support for VMs, and secure boot plus cryptographic hypervisor assurance for ESXi.
Chapter 13, Analyzing and Optimizing Your Environment, covers the native tools used to monitor your environment for performance analysis or for possible issues in order to improve the virtual environment and workloads. This chapter focuses on monitoring different critical resources, such as computing, storage, and networking resources, across ESXi hosts, resource pools, and clusters. Other tools, such as vRealize Operations and third-party tools, will also be described briefly .
Chapter 14, Troubleshooting Your Environment, covers the native tools used to troubleshoot performance issues and other issues in a vSphere environment. Also, the chapter provides some examples and methods for troubleshooting approaches.
Chapter 15, Building Your Own VMware vSphere Lab, goes into the basics of why you should build your own lab environment, looking at what the benefits of running such a lab are in comparison with using VMware Hands-On Labs (HOLs). Different approaches to how labs can be designed will be covered.
