Part 3 – Maintain a Virtual Infrastructure

Chapter 9, Monitoring, Optimizing, and Troubleshooting, covers the native tools used for monitor and troubleshoot performance and other issues in order to improve the VM and the workloads. The chapter focuses on monitoring different critical resources, such as computing, storage, and networking across the ESXi hosts, the resource pools, and clusters. Other tools, such as vRealize Operations and third-party tools, are also briefly described.

Chapter 10, Securing and Protecting Your Environment, explains that, in addition to the security and hardening aspects of vSphere, the new 6.5 version introduces some new, important features related to this aspect, such as VM Encryption, Encrypted vMotion, Secure Boot Support for VMs, and Secure Boot Plus Cryptographic Hypervisor Assurance for ESXi. In addition, vSphere 6.5 introduces audit-quality logging for vSphere events.

Chapter 11, Lifecycle Management, Patching, and Upgrading, explains that with vSphere 6.5, administrators will find significantly more powerful capabilities for patching, upgrading, and managing the configuration of the VM using Update Manager and host profile features. We will also cover the upgrade path and consideration to upgrade or migrate your VM.