NSXTD4 - VMware NSX: Design v4.x

Course Overview

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.

Product Alignment

VMware NSX 4.1.0

Who should attend

Network and security architects and consultants who design the enterprise and data center networks and NSX environments

Prerequisites

Before taking this course, you must complete the following course:

VMware NSX: Install, Configure, Manage [V4.0] (NSXICM4)
You should also have understanding or knowledge of these technologies:

Good understanding of TCP/IP services and protocols
Knowledge and working experience of computer networking and security, including:
Switching and routing technologies (L2 and L3)
Network and application delivery services (L4 through L7)
Firewalling (L4 through L7)
vSphere environments
The VMware Certified Professional – Network Virtualization certification is recommended.

Course Objectives

By the end of the course, you should be able to meet the following objectives:

Describe and apply a design framework
Apply a design process for gathering requirements, constraints, assumptions, and risks
Design a VMware vSphere® virtual data center to support NSX requirements
Create a VMware NSX® Manager™ cluster design
Create a VMware NSX® Edge™ cluster design to support traffic and service requirements in NSX
Design logical switching and routing
Recognize NSX security best practices
Design logical network services
Design a physical network to support network virtualization in a software-defined data center
Create a design to support the NSX infrastructure across multiple sites
Describe the factors that drive performance in NSX

Course Outline

Course Introduction

Introduction and course logistics
Course objectives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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