Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Administration: Cluster Management and Operations

Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Administration: Cluster Management and Operations

About the Course

This three-day professional training program provides an in-depth exploration of managing and maintaining leading hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) clusters. As organizations move toward automated, software-defined data centers, mastering the integration of compute, storage, and virtualization is essential. This course focuses on the daily operational tasks required to keep an HCI environment performing at peak efficiency, utilizing industry-standard management tools and specialized orchestration plugins.

The curriculum is designed to bridge the gap between traditional hardware management and modern software-defined orchestration. Students will learn how to navigate the centralized management interface to provision resources, scale environments, and ensure high availability for enterprise applications. By focusing on a unified management plane, the course demonstrates how to reduce manual intervention and streamline lifecycle operations across the entire cluster.

Beyond basic administration, participants will develop the skills necessary to proactively monitor system health and resolve common performance bottlenecks. The training covers essential maintenance workflows, including non-disruptive updates and hardware replacement procedures. By the end of this course, IT professionals will have the technical confidence to manage a robust HCI solution that supports business-critical workloads with minimal downtime.

Audience Profile

This course is intended for:

• System administrators responsible for the daily oversight of HCI clusters.

• IT professionals tasked with provisioning and managing virtualized resources.

• Infrastructure engineers focusing on software-defined storage and compute integration.

• Technical partners and support staff who manage enterprise-grade hyper-converged solutions.

Learning Objectives

Domain 1: System Architecture and Infrastructure

• Identify the core architectural components and hardware configurations of the HCI solution.

• Understand the relationship between the virtualization layer and software-defined storage.

• Recognize the specialized orchestration engines that automate deployment and scaling.

Domain 2: Resource Provisioning and Cluster Management

• Execute administrative tasks using the integrated management plugin for centralized controllers.

• Configure and provision virtual resources, including storage policies and network settings.

• Manage node-level operations and cluster-wide resource allocation.

Domain 3: Performance Monitoring and Health Analysis

• Utilize built-in dashboards to monitor real-time system status and performance metrics.

• Interpret health indicators to identify potential hardware or software issues.

• Implement proactive alerting to maintain environment stability.

Domain 4: Maintenance and Troubleshooting

• Perform routine system maintenance and execute lifecycle management (LCM) updates.

• Identify and remediate basic system issues using standard troubleshooting workflows.

• Execute recovery procedures and coordinate log collection for advanced technical support.

Prerequisites

• Foundational understanding of vSphere administration and virtual machine management.

• Basic knowledge of software-defined storage (SDS) concepts.

• Familiarity with standard networking protocols and data center hardware.