VMware Cloud Foundation: Automate and Operate [V9.1]

Overview

This five-day course provides knowledge, skills, and abilities to achieve competence in automating and operating a VCF Private Cloud using VMware Cloud Foundation Automation and Operations. Learners will explore VCF Automation architecture, provider and organization management, networking, content library management, blueprints, catalogs, supervisor management, and workload deployment. The course also covers VCF Operations, including customizing alerts, views, reports, dashboards, policies, logs, storage health, diagnostics, service discovery, and application monitoring.

Prerequisites

Participants should have:

• VMware Cloud Foundation: Build, Manage and Secure [v9.1]

Target audience

• This course is designed for:
• System administrators
• Solution engineers
• Consultants
• Architects
• Support personnel

Objectives

By the end of this course, learners will be able to:

• Describe VCF Automation components and supporting architecture
• Perform infrastructure management as a cloud provider
• Set up regions and organizations as the cloud provider
• Configure networking at the cloud provider and organization level using VCF Automation 9.1 Network Architecture
• Set up and manage content libraries at the provider and organization level, including MSRQ enhancements introduced in VCF 9.1
• Manage access control in the organization using users and groups
• Create and manage infrastructure blueprints and catalogs

Outline

Course Introduction

• Introduction and course logistics
• Course objectives and overview of VCF 9.1

VCF Automation Overview

• Common terms in a VCF deployment
• Fleet-wide identity providers in VCF Operations
• Features and benefits of VCF Automation
• Building blocks and architecture of VCF Automation
• VCF Management Service Platform

Provider Infrastructure Management

• Provider management portal
• Discover infrastructure resources and validate vCenter, VCF Instance, NSX Manager, and Edge clusters
• Infrastructure policies in VCF Automation

Provider Identity Management

• Enable and configure VCF Single Sign-On for the Automation Appliance
• Identity providers used in VCF Automation (OpenID, LDAP, SAML)
• Predefined roles, rights bundles, and access control
• Service accounts and API tokens

VCF Automation Regions

• Define a region and prerequisites for creating a region
• Relationship between a region, Supervisor, and NSX Manager
• VM Classes, reserved VM Classes, and storage classes
• Features and capabilities of the provider content library

VCF Automation Organizations

• Different organizations offered in VCF Automation
• Region quota enhancements in VCF 9.1 over VCF 9.0
• Design Multi-Supervisor Region (MSRQ) environments
• Auto-expansion and auto-shrinkage features of content libraries in MSRQ
• Tenant content library placement changes introduced in VCF 9.1
• Create an All Apps Organization

VCF Automation Networking

• VCF Automation 9.1 Network Architecture and UI enhancements
• Provider Networking, External IP Blocks, and shared Subnets
• Integration of Infoblox IPAM introduced in VCF Automation 9.1
• Regional Networking
• Configure Organization Networking (VPC, Transit Gateway, VLAN Extended Subnet)
• Configure Workload Networking and VM Load Balancer Service

Organization Management

• Creating and managing projects, vSphere namespaces, and namespace classes
• Namespace Self-Service and binding workflows
• Namespace update workflows
• Apply infrastructure policies in VCF Automation

Organization Content Management

• Identify and manage content available in Content Hub
• Create and deploy VCF Automation Blueprints using YAML
• Supervisor Namespace capture feature
• Configure and use Custom Forms
• Embedded Orchestrator and Workflows

Deploy Modern Apps

• Cloud services deployed through vSphere Supervisor
• Self-service consumption with IaaS services in VCF 9.1
• Direct mode versus linked mode in IaaS
• End-to-end workflow for deploying Virtual Machine instances
• Define container service in VCF Automation

VCF Operations Overview

• Key features and use cases of VCF Operations
• Components of a VCF Operations node and cluster
• Availability Zones
• Basic VCF Operations console navigation

VCF Metrics, Views, and Reports

• Role of metrics and views in VCF Operations
• Create a basic custom view and configure view settings
• Create a basic report and configure report settings

Dashboards

• Functions of dashboards
• Create dashboards using predefined and custom widgets
• Manage dashboards by grouping and sharing with users

VCF Operations Policies

• Purposes of policies in VCF Operations
• Configure policies and other components

Symptoms and Alerts

• Purpose of using alerts and components of an alert definition
• Create static symptom definitions and configure threshold types
• Configure a custom alert using the Create Alert Definition workflow

VCF Health, Findings, and Workbench

• Role of VCF Health and Diagnostics
• Monitor the operational state of VCF Instances
• Capabilities of Troubleshooting Workbench
• Enable support teams with full context using Log Assist

VCF Logs and Storage

• Log management capabilities in VCF Operations
• Identify performance and health issues with Storage clusters

Workload Monitoring

• Infrastructure services and application monitoring capabilities
• Enable service discovery for a VCF deployment
• VKS cluster monitoring capabilities introduced in VCF Operations 9.1
• Configure vCenter and VCF Operations to enable VKS enhanced observability

Exams and assessments

This course helps students prepare for the VMware Certified Professional – VMware Cloud Foundation Administrator exam which is available separately.

Hands-on learning

This course includes practical hands-on labs for each module.