Introduction to Virtualization course description

A comprehensive tour of virtualization. The course concentrates on the actual technologies involved as opposed to any one vendor solution.

What will you learn

• Explain the concepts of virtualization.
• Partition servers.
• Create Virtual Machines.

Introduction to Virtualization course details

Introduction to Virtualization course contents

• Virtualization Concepts

What is Virtualisation? What are virtual machines (VMs)? Virtualisation Landscape. Network Virtualisation. Suitability for Organisations. Advantages of deploying Virtualisation. Downsides of deploying Virtualisation. Overview of Virtualisation products.

• Hypervisors

What is a hypervisor? Difference between type 1 and 2 hypervisors. Available hypervisors. Hypervisors and device drivers.
Hands on: Installing Oracle VirtualBox on Windows. Creating/Importing/Configuring VMs.

• Virtualization Hosts

Hardware and resource requirements. Installation of the hypervisor.
Hands on: Installing Hyper-V role into Windows Server. Creating/Importing/Configuring VMs.

• Virtual Machines

Creating virtual machines. Resource requirements. Settings. Installation of the guest OS. Additional tools/ extensions for hypervisor integration. VM files and their uses. Virtual hard disk and their formats. Hardware pass through.
Hands on: Connecting to VMWare ESXi via WebGUI and using ESXi to create/import/configure VMs.

• VM Snapshots/Checkpoints

What is a snapshot? How to use them and how they impact performance? Creating/deleting/merging of snapshots.
Hands on: Using ESXi to create/manage snapshots.

• Command Line use on the Hypervisor

Interacting with the hypervisor through the command line. Simple commands to configure the hypervisor and VMs. Simple scripts.
Hands on: Connecting to VMWare ESXi via PowerCLI to manipulate VMs and snaphshots.

• Virtualization Storage

Different types of storage: local vs remote. Local and remote storage technologies. Configuring storage.
Hands on: Using ESXi to deploy VMs on remote NFS storage.

• Virtual Networking

How is networking done in virtualization environments. What is a virtual switch and vNIC and what are their performance characteristics? NIC teaming and trunking in the virtual world. Port groups and isolation. Physical NICs and their use in virtual switches.
Hands on: Using ESXi to create and configure vswitches and networking.

• Templates and clones

What is a template? What is a clone? When to use templates and clones to optimize VM deployment.

• Migrating/Importing VMs

What is migration? Migrating compute and storage. Importing VMs from files or physical machines.
Hands on: Using VMWare vCenter Server to clone/ template/migrate VMs, tag resources, create local user accounts and assign permissions.

• VMs and Backups

Taking backups of your VMs. Restoring your VMs from backups.

• Virtualization and Licensing

Different licensing models and costs.

• Containerization Concepts

What is a container and how is it different from a virtual machine. When to use containers. Docker and Kubernetes

Learning path

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