VMware NSX: Design [V4.x] Training

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.

Audience

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

Product Alignment

• VMware NSX 4.1.0

Prerequisites

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

• VMware NSX: Install, Configure, Manage [V4.0]

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.

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

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