VCFSAD Outline - VMware Cloud Foundation: Solution Architecture and Design

Detailed Course Outline

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.