Yesterday, I took the VCAP-NV Design 2020 exam remotely from the comfort and safety of my own home. The exam is based on NSX-T 2.4, which is retiring soon on October 31st, 2020. There is a 3.0 version available at the moment which will be the one used in the future. Luckily I have had the chance to work exclusively with a VCF on VxRAIL implementation with vSAN stretched clusters and NSX-V & NSX-T. Being a part of the design process from the very start gave me insights into what is needed to successfully take a project from the business requirements, the RFP process all the way through to developing the high and low level design guides for the solution. I found that a few specific study resources helped me a lot during this process and I wanted to outline them here:
Essential Books:
VMware vSphere 6.7 Data Center Design Cookbook by Mike Brown & Hersey Cartwright
Essential White papers:
VMware Validated Design for NetApp HCI: https://www.netapp.com/us/media/nva-1128-design.pdf (This is not NSX-T related, but it is a very well written document with design decisions, logical design placement and networking examples)
Architecting a VMware vSphere® Compute Platform for VMware Cloud Providers™: https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/vcat/architecting-a-vmware-vsphere-compute-platform.pdf
Architecture and Design for VMware NSX-T Workload Domains: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Validated-Design/5.1/vmware-validated-design-51-sddc-nsxt-workload-architecture-design-multiple-availability-zones.pdf
Essential Blogs:
Read the NSX-T 2.5 Design Guide:
I used this great study guide courtesy of Frances Wong @frances_wong https://virtually2cents.com/nsx-t-2-4-study-guide-support/
Other notable items:
With any NSX-T design, it is important to understand workload traffic patterns (i.e. east / west traffic flows) and dependancies and how NSX-T should be configured to suit these.
It is also important to understand N-VDS teaming policies and how these policies affect high availability and performance for the applicable traffic. NSX-T system component placement should also be considered.
Performance factors with NSX-T:
DPDK
Compute Node considerations
Edge VM Node considerations
Bare Metal Edge Performance Factors
NSX-T physical NIC considerations
NFV: Raw Packet Processing Performance
