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Course Summary:

This five-day course provides comprehensive training on considerations and practices to design a VMware NSX® environment as part of a software-defined data center strategy. This course prepares the student with the skills to lead the design of an NSX environment, including design principles, processes, and frameworks. The student gains a deeper understanding of the NSX architecture and how it can be used to create solutions to address the customer’s business needs.

Course Duration: 5 Days


Course Content:

1 Course Introduction

  • Introduction and course logistics
  • Course objectives

2 NSX Design Concepts

  • Identify design terms
  • Describe framework and project methodology
  • Describe the role of VMware Cloud Foundation™ in NSX design
  • Identify customers’ requirements, assumptions, constraints, and risks
  • Explain the conceptual design
  • Explain the logical design
  • Explain the physical design

3 NSX Architecture and Components

  • Recognize the main elements in the NSX architecture
  • Describe the NSX management cluster and the management plane
  • Identify the functions and components of management, control, and data planes
  • Describe the NSX Manager sizing options
  • Recognize the justification and implication of NSX Manager cluster design decisions
  • Identify the NSX management cluster design options

4 NSX Edge Design

  • Explain the leading practices for edge design
  • Describe the NSX Edge VM reference designs
  • Describe the bare-metal NSX Edge reference designs
  • Explain the leading practices for edge cluster design
  • Explain the effect of stateful services placement
  • Explain the growth patterns for edge clusters
  • Identify design considerations when using L2 bridging services

5 NSX Logical Switching Design

  • Describe concepts and terminology in logical switching
  • Identify segment and transport zone design considerations
  • Identify virtual switch design considerations
  • Identify uplink profile and transport node profile design considerations
  • Identify Geneve tunneling design considerations
  • Identify BUM replication mode design considerations

6 NSX Logical Routing Design

  • Explain the function and features of logical routing
  • Describe the NSX single-tier and multitier routing architectures
  • Identify guidelines when selecting a routing topology
  • Describe the BGP and OSPF routing protocol configuration options
  • Explain gateway high availability modes of operation and failure detection mechanisms
  • Identify how multitier architectures provide control over stateful service location
  • Identify EVPN requirements and design considerations
  • Identify VRF Lite requirements and considerations
  • Identify the typical NSX scalable architectures

7 NSX Security Design

  • Identify different security features available in NSX
  • Describe the advantages of an NSX Distributed Firewall
  • Describe the use of NSX Gateway Firewall as a perimeter firewall and as an intertenant firewall
  • Determine a security policy methodology
  • Recognize the NSX security best practices

8 NSX Network Services

  • Identify the stateful services available in different edge cluster high availability modes
  • Describe failover detection mechanisms
  • Compare NSX NAT solutions
  • Explain how to select DHCP and DNS services
  • Compare policy-based and route-based IPSec VPN
  • Describe an L2 VPN topology that can be used to interconnect data centers
  • Explain the design considerations for integrating VMware NSX® Advanced Load Balancer™ with NSX

9 Physical Infrastructure Design

  • Identify the components of a switch fabric design
  • Assess Layer 2 and Layer 3 switch fabric design implications
  • Review guidelines when designing top-of-rack switches
  • Review options for connecting transport hosts to the switch fabric
  • Describe typical designs for VMware ESXi™ compute hypervisors with two pNICs
  • Describe typical designs for ESXi compute hypervisors with four or more pNICs
  • Differentiate dedicated and collapsed cluster approaches to SDDC design

10 NSX Multilocation Design

  • Explain scale considerations in an NSX multisite design
  • Describe the main components of the NSX Federation architecture
  • Describe the stretched networking capability in Federation
  • Describe stretched security use cases in Federation
  • Compare the Federation disaster recovery designs

11 NSX Optimization and DPU-Based Acceleration

  • Describe Geneve Offload
  • Describe the benefits of Receive Side Scaling and Geneve Rx Filters
  • Explain the benefits of SSL Offload
  • Describe the effect of Multi-TEP, MTU size, and NIC speed on throughput
  • Explain the available enhanced datapath modes and use cases
  • List the key performance factors for compute nodes and NSX Edge nodes
  • Describe DPU-Based Acceleration
  • Define the NSX features supported by DPUs
  • Describe the hardware and networking configurations supported with DPUs