VMware vSphere: Troubleshooting is a 5-day, hands-on training course which provides students with the advanced knowledge, skills, and abilities to achieve competence in troubleshooting the VMware vSphere® 7.x environment. This workshop increases your skill and competence in using the command-line interface, VMware vSphere® Client™, log files, and other tools to analyze and solve problems.
Attendance of this course meets the training requirement to achieve the following certification:

• VMware Certified Professional – Data Center Virtualization (VCP-DCV)

This course is also recommended if you aim to achieve the following certification:

• VMware Certified Advanced Professional – Data Center Virtualization (VCAP-DCV) Deploy

Upon completing this course, the student will be able to meet these objectives:

• Introduce troubleshooting principles and procedures
• Use command-line interfaces, log files, and the vSphere Client to diagnose and resolve problems in the vSphere environment
• Describe the benefits and capabilities of VMware Skyline
• Explain the purpose of key vSphere log files
• Identify networking problems based on reported symptoms, validate, and troubleshoot the reported problem, identify the root cause, and implement the appropriate resolution
• Analyze storage failure scenarios using a logical troubleshooting methodology, identify the root cause, and apply the appropriate resolution to resolve the problem
• Troubleshoot vSphere cluster failure scenarios and analyze possible causes
• Diagnose common VMware vSphere® High Availability problems and provide solutions
• Identify and validate VMware ESXi™ host and VMware vCenter Server® problems, analyze failure scenarios, and select the correct resolution
• Troubleshoot virtual machine problems, including migration problems, snapshot problems, and connection problems
• Troubleshoot performance problems with vSphere components

The primary audience for this course is as follows:

• System Administrators
• System Integrators

This course requires completion of the following prerequisites:

• VMware vSphere: Fast Track [6.x] or [V7]
• VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage [6.x] or [V7]
• VMware vSphere: Optimize and Scale [V6.x] or [V7]
• Equivalent knowledge and administration experience with ESXi and vCenter Server

Experience in working with a command-line interface is highly recommended.

Module 1: Course Introduction

• Introductions and course logistics
• Course objectives

Module 2: Introduction to Troubleshooting

• Define the scope of troubleshooting
• Use a structured approach to solve configuration and operational problems
• Apply a troubleshooting methodology to logically diagnose faults and improve troubleshooting efficiency

Module 3: Troubleshooting Tools

• Use command-line tools (such as ESXCLI) to identify and troubleshoot vSphere problems
• Identify important vSphere log files and interpret the log file contents
• Describe the benefits and capabilities of VMware Skyline
• Explain how VMware Skyline works
• Identify uses for Skyline Advisor

Module 4: Troubleshooting Virtual Networking

• Analyze and resolve standard switch and distributed switch problems
• Analyze virtual machine connectivity problems and fix them
• Examine common management network connectivity problems and restore configurations

Module 5: Troubleshooting Storage

• Troubleshoot and resolve storage (iSCSI, NFS, and VMware vSphere® VMFS) connectivity and configuration problems
• Analyze and resolve common VM snapshot problems
• Identify and resolve multipathing-related problems, including common causes of permanent device loss (PDL) and all paths down (APD) event problems

Module 6: Troubleshooting vSphere Clusters

• Identify and recover from problems related to vSphere HA
• Analyze and resolve VMware vSphere® vMotion® configuration and operational problems
• Analyze and resolve common VMware vSphere® Distributed Resource Scheduler™ problems

Module 7: Troubleshooting Virtual Machines

• Identify, analyze, and solve virtual machine snapshot problems
• Troubleshoot virtual machine power-on problems
• Identify possible causes and troubleshoot virtual machine connection state problems
• Diagnose and recover from VMware Tools™ installation failures

Module 8: Troubleshooting vCenter Server and ESXi

• Analyze and fix problems with vCenter Server services
• Diagnose and troubleshoot vCenter Server
• Database problems
• Examine ESXi host and vCenter Server failure scenarios and resolve the problems