Detailed Course Outline
1. Introduction
- Explain the value of VCF as an operational cost argument, not a feature list.
- Describe what VCF 9.1 consolidates, and what is still yours to design.
- Differentiate the personas a private cloud serves and the decisions each one drives.
- Describe the five AMPRS qualities and the trade-offs they create.
- Sequence a design decision as requirement, decision, justification and implication.
2. Fleet Designs and Blueprints
- Describe how the Fleet, Instance, Domain, Cluster and Host constructs nest.
- Choose a fleet deployment model and a fleet sizing model from stated requirements.
- Design a fleet from a published blueprint, substituting Design Library models.
- Choose an edge design pattern for a given site count, WAN budget and autonomy requirements.
- Differentiate the three recovery tiers and identify which one answers a failure.
3. Fleet Components
- Size a VCF Operations analytics cluster from an object count and an availability model.
- Choose a License Server model and defend the choice against a named requirement.
- Describe what runs on the VCF Management Services runtime and what stays a separate appliance.
- Differentiate the Simple and High Availability VCFMS models by their failure behavior.
- Design Log Management retention, partitioning and archiving to a stated requirement.
- Place the Identity Broker as a per-Instance service and pick its deployment model.
4. Instance, Domain and Cluster Designs
- Describe the Instance, Domain and Cluster constructs and the related design decisions.
- Design a Management Domain: sizing, storage, networking and the reserves it must hold.
- Place every management component correctly in a first and an additional Instance.
- Choose how many Workload Domains an estate needs and defend each one by what it isolates.
- Choose a cluster model and a vSAN cluster type, then size the host count that follows.
- Explain how a storage policy sets usable capacity and the minimum host count.
5. Consumption
- Identify every path a consumer can take to reach the platform.
- Design a VCF Automation tenancy model from Organizations down to quota.
- Choose between the All Apps and VM Apps Organization models.
- Explain Supervisor activation and associated design decisions.
- Design the substrate a VKS cluster and its related services need.
- Place VCF Operations Orchestrator, Harbor, DSM and Private AI within a solution design.
6. Physical Datacenter Architecture
- Explain the five physical layers comprising a VCF-ready datacenter.
- Size rack power and cooling for mixed VM, container and accelerated AI hosts.
- Design a leaf-spine fabric that meets VCF bandwidth, latency and MTU needs.
- Choose a single-site, multi-site or multi-region fabric based on stated requirements.
- Identify the CPU, memory, NVMe drives and uplinks a ReadyNode must carry.
- Explain how NUMA and the 9.1 Topology Aware Scheduler affect placement.
7. Networking
- Design the VLAN and MTU plan a VCF solution requires, end to end.
- Choose a distributed switch model from the physical adapters you can justify.
- Differentiate centralized and distributed connectivity and size what each need.
- Place a workload on the network and choose where its traffic is inspected.
- Choose between the NSX load balancer, Avi Load Balancer and an incumbent ADC.
8. Storage Design
- Choose a principal and a supplemental storage model based on stated requirements.
- Explain the vSAN ESA architecture and the data services it delivers by default.
- Design storage policies and size raw capacity from the resulting space factor.
- Design the vSAN network, encryption and operational model.
- Integrate Kubernetes persistent storage with vSAN through storage policies.
- Design NFS and Fiber Channel storage where an array estate already exists.
9. Management Domain Backup and Restore
- Design a backup solution that covers every VCF management component.
- Size an SFTP target from backup size, retention and instance count.
- Sequence a full instance restore in the documented dependency order.
- Outline the instance recovery toolkit, its prerequisites and its cmdlets.
- Design fleet disaster recovery across two instances in two regions.
- Explain the recovery point and recovery time each tier can support