VMware Cloud Director: Install Configure Manage [V10.3]

In this five-day course, you focus on installing, configuring, and managing VMware Cloud Director® 10.3. You learn about workload provisioning, the creation of organizations, virtual data centers (VDCs), catalog services that include predefined virtual machines, and on-demand VMware NSX-T™ Data Center networks.

This course also covers interfacing VMware Cloud Director with other systems and the integration and use of VMware vRealize® Orchestrator™ for VMware Cloud Director. You learn about different networks that a system administrator and an organization administrator can configure and use with virtual machines (VMs). This course also discusses how to monitor various VMware Cloud Director objects using VMware vRealize® Operations™.

Objectives

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

• Deploy VMware Cloud Director
• Manage VMware Cloud Director to meet the service provider needs
• Create and manage VMware Cloud Director organizations and vApps to fulfill business needs
• Create and manage VMware Cloud Director catalogs
• Transfer virtual machine workloads from VMware vSphere® into and out of VMware Cloud Director
• Configure networking for organizations and vApps with the help of VMware NSX-T™ Data Center
• Managing resources from the VMWare Cloud Director console and using VMware vRealize® Operations Manager™
• Enabling VM and Named Disk Encryption 
• Creating VM sizing and placement policies
• Understand vApps and VM operations and actions

Intended Audience

Cloud architects, systems engineers, datacenter administrators, and cloud administrators with experience in managed services or managing a service provider environment.

Prerequisites

Completion of the following courses and equivalent knowledge is required:

• VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage [V7.x] or equivalent knowledge

The following experience is helpful:

• Working at the Linux command line
• Substantial knowledge of general networking concepts

Product Alignment

• VMware vSphere 7.0 U2
• VMware Cloud Director 10.3
• VMware NSX-T Data Center 3.1.1
• VMware vRealize Operations Manager 8.3

Course Outline

1 Course Introduction

• Introductions and course logistics
• Course objectives

2 Software-Defined Data Center and VMware Validated Design

• Define software-defined data center (SDDC)
• Discuss VMware offerings for cloud-based services
• Discuss the deployment options for VMware Cloud Director
• Discuss VMware Validated Design™
• Recognize the design considerations when creating a cloud environment on the SDDC using VMWare Cloud Foundation™

3 VMware Cloud Director Deployment and Configuration

• Discuss the deployment options for VMware Cloud Director
• Explain the two-stage deployment of VMware Cloud Director cells
• Discuss failover mechanisms (automatic and manual) with VMware Cloud Director cells
• Define switchover, promote, and fencing options of the VMware Cloud Director appliance
• Understand the VMware Cloud Director appliance enhancements

4 VMware Cloud Director Provider Configuration

• Describe how the compute resources are provided to VMware Cloud Director
• Describe how storage is provided to VMware Cloud Director
• Configure and manage storage for Virtual Datacenters (VDCs)
• Briefly discuss network pools, external networks, and Tier-0 Gateways
• Showcase VMware Cloud Director integration with vCenter Server® and NSX-T Data Center
• Describe VMware Cloud Director organizations
• Understand organization policies
• Explain how to access an organization using various portals
• Understand organization VDC
• Discuss what is Linked Clone and Fast Provisioning
• Understand the use cases of Allocation Models

5 VMware Cloud Director User, Roles and Quota Management

• Discuss user-bundle
• Describe role-based access
• Explain custom roles and rights
• Describe and configure LDAP integration with Active Directory
• Discuss OIDC authentication methods
• Describe SAML identity provider

6 VMware Cloud Director Virtual Machines and vApps

• Understand standalone VMs
• Discuss the VM managing operations
• Explain VM properties
• Discuss deployment methods of vApps
• Discuss the vApp managing operations
• Discuss the vApp lease policies
• Understand the vApps and VM actions
• Explain vApp and VM badges

7 VMware Cloud Director Content Libraries

• Explain the purpose of catalogs and how to create a catalog organization
• Define catalog management and sharing catalogs inside and between organizations
• Explain medias in VMware Cloud Director and its usage
• Discuss vApp templates
• Understand vApp template operations
• Describe the purpose and usage of Open Virtualization Format (OVF)
• Discuss organization VDC templates

8 VMware Cloud Director Networking

• Discuss organization VDC networks
• List the types of organization VDC networks
• Describe the edge gateway services
• Explore the services offered by the edge gateway
• Discuss sub-allocation IP pool and its use cases
• Discuss DHCP, NAT, load balancer, and firewall services on the edge gateway
• Discuss SNAT, DNAT, NO SNAT, and NO DNAT use cases
• Explain routing and distributed firewall services
• Discuss vApp networks
• List the various types of vApp networks
• Discuss routed, isolated, and direct vApp networks

9 VMware Cloud Director Storage and Compute

• Describe named disks and shared named disks
• Demonstrate how to attach and detach a named disk and a shared named disk
• Describe methods of sharing the named disk
• Discuss the implications of deleting VMs that have an attached named disk
• Discuss how VMware Cloud Director VMs and disks are encrypted
• Explain the storage policy capabilities
• Demonstrate how VM sizing and placement policies are published
• Discuss vCenter server and VMware Cloud Director IOPS storage policies usage
• Discuss how to enable and use the storage IOPS limitation in VMware Cloud Director
• Describe the storage policy supported entities

10 Extensibility and UI Additional Features

• Briefly discuss enhanced CPOM through the tenant portal
• Briefly discuss VMware Cloud Availability plugin for VMware Cloud Director portal
• Integrate vRealize Orchestrator with VMware Cloud Director
• Execute VMware Cloud Director workflows using vRealize Orchestrator
• Briefly discuss Container Service Extension
• Briefly explain the main usage and purpose of the NSX migration of VMware Cloud Director tool
• Explain custom advisories, global search, guided tours, data exporter, keyboard shortcuts, and quick search
• Understand vcd-cli supported commands
• Discuss various vcd-cli tools

11 VMware Cloud Director Resource Monitoring

• Identify log locations for VMware Cloud Director
• Manage vSphere and cloud resources from VMware Cloud Director
• Understand monitoring of objects from VMware Cloud Director portals
• Briefly introduce vRealize Operations Manager
• Integrate VMware Cloud Director with vRealize Operations Manager
• Configure VMware Cloud Director Management Pack
• Understand dashboard, metrics, alerts, alert definition, and reports