This is an attempt to put a study guide together for the VMware Certified Advanced Professional (VCAP)- Network Virtualisation Deployment (3V0-643) certification. This is part 1 of a 20.
At the time of writing there is no VCAP Design exam stream, thus you’re automatically granted the new VMware Certified Implementation Expert – Network Virtualisation (VCIX6-NV) certification by successfully passing the VCAP6-NV exam. Bonus.
As per any VMware exam the blueprint is highly recommend to read and follow. In this case it’s actually an Exam Preparation Guide v1.2 which can be found here.
Firstly, I want to provide an overview of my lab. I have done most of this before nested inside VMware workstation on my laptop, but for extra performance and to remove the lag and latency I approached my employer Computer Concepts Limited and asked for an allocation of compute, storage and networking in our Cloud platform that is provided by VMware vCloud Director. Request approved! Awesome, onto building the base platform.
So my lab platform consists of:
2x vCenter Server Appliances v6.0 U2 (management and compute clusters)
6x vSphere ESXi hosts v6.0 U2 (split between management and compute clusters)
1x Windows 2012 R2 Domain Controller
1x Windows 2012 R2 RDS Host
OpenFiler 2.99 for iSCSI storage (shared storage for hosts)
All the licensing for my lab and NSX is covered by the vExpert Program.
There is some small tweaks that need to be completed behind the scenes for nesting of ESXi on top of vCloud Director ESXi hosts. The port group that backs my lab network requires Promiscuous Mode and Forged Transmits to be enabled. Without these settings enabled you will not be able to communicate with anything that you deploy on top of your ESXi hosts.
On purpose when I built the platform I deployed it all as vCenter 5.5/vSphere 5.5 and then went and upgraded the whole lot to 6.0 U2 (yeah, just for a bit of extra fun!), and then proceeded to split out the embedded Platform Services Controller (PSC) to an external deployment.
The reason I am using external PSCs is further down the track I want a single SSO domain spanning 2 vCenters with Enhanced Link Mode for a single pane of glass and embedded PSCs are not supported.
My lab from within vCloud Director looks like this below, and at this point I am using a single 10Gb NIC, more will be added as I progress the build. All connections to this lab will be via the RDS host from where I launch the vSphere Web and C# client.
vCloud Director LAB
From this point on anything that is deployed will be on the nested lab ESXi hosts. I currently have 1 v Center looking after all the hosts, split over 3 clusters.
LAB cluster and hosts
The lab has 2 vSphere Distributed Switches (vDS); one for management hosts and one for the compute/edge cluster hosts.
Management vDS
Compute vDS
Both vDS have the MTU size set to the recommended minimum of 1600 bytes.
vDS MTU size set to 1600 bytes
- Deploy NSX Manager
- Integrate NSX Manager with vCenter
- Configure SSO
- Specify Syslog Server
- Implement and Configure NSX Controllers
- Exclude virtual machines from firewall protection
Musings from a past life 
[…] Read part 1 here. […]
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[…] Part 1 – Intro Part 2 – Objective 1.1 Part 3 – Objective 1.2 Part 4 – Objective 1.3 […]
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[…] Part 1 – Intro Part 2 – Objective 1.1 Part 3 – Objective 1.2 Part 4 – Objective 1.3 Part 5 – Objective 2.1 […]
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[…] Part 1 – Intro Part 2 – Objective 1.1 Part 3 – Objective 1.2 Part 4 – Objective 1.3 Part 5 – Objective 2.1 Part 6 – Objective 2.2 […]
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[…] Part 1 – Intro Part 2 – Objective 1.1 Part 3 – Objective 1.2 Part 4 – Objective 1.3 Part 5 – Objective 2.1 Part 6 – Objective 2.2 Part 7 – Objective 3.1 […]
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[…] Part 1 – Intro Part 2 – Objective 1.1 Part 3 – Objective 1.2 Part 4 – Objective 1.3 Part 5 – Objective 2.1 Part 6 – Objective 2.2 Part 7 – Objective 2.3 Part 8 – Objective 3.1 […]
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[…] Part 1 – Intro Part 2 – Objective 1.1 Part 3 – Objective 1.2 Part 4 – Objective 1.3 Part 5 – Objective 2.1 Part 6 – Objective 2.2 Part 7 – Objective 2.3 Part 8 – Objective 3.1 Part 9A – Objective 3.2 IPSec VPNs […]
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Hello Mr Clinton.
I wonder if i cant afford a lab like the one you have in here, is there any other way to practice the objectives of the “Deploy VCAP6-NV”? for example VMware hands on lab HOL, would that suffice ?
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You can do a lot of what I am doing on a decent laptop with SSDs and 32GB RAM all nested within VMware Workstation, but you will get to a point where the laptop won’t have enough grunt to run everything. HOL is very good but doesn’t cover all the lab objectives. The other option is to pay a monthly fee to a cloud provider for some capacity for a few months while you study. To pass any VCAP exam you will need experience with the product and study, it’s a race against the clock, even worse from NZ with the latency. Good luck.
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Hello, thanks a lot for you advice 🙂
but may you recommend me a good cloud provider for that which i may pay a decent fee for my lab?!
and the last question and sorry if i do bother. i dont know how exactly to build the same lab on a cloud provider, for example how i would be able to upload and install the vCenter 6.0 over there, in brief how i should plan this?
Thanks a lot
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Get your hands on a second hand server, my first one cost $500. It does not need heaps of storage but you would want at least 64GB RAM. You can run nested labs on that, and that will negate the need to use the cloud. You can use this for all types of study and is worth the investment.
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Hello Mr Clinton, first of all id love to thank you for your great help i appreciate it :).
today i got an approval from the CTO of my corporate to use the Test environment to to build the VCAP6-NV practice lab, it is vCenter6.0 environment with 4 ESXI 6.0 servers with 47 GIgs of RAM each.
i believe there are some technical difficulties to build my “Nested” lab spreading over them. mentioning that im now allowed at all to mess up with the basic TEST environment setup, is that right? and if so, can i just use just one if them ’47 Gigs of RAM’ using its all RAM capacity for the lab ? what is you recommendations sir ?
Thank you
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I don’t have time to help you build a lab sorry, there is plenty of resource on the Internet to guide you. You could use all four for your lab, or just use one and nest everything on it.
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Hello, Thank you for your great help, i appreciate your time.
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[…] Part 1 – Intro Part 2 – Objective 1.1 Part 3 – Objective 1.2 Part 4 – Objective 1.3 Part 5 – Objective 2.1 Part 6 – Objective 2.2 Part 7 – Objective 2.3 Part 8 – Objective 3.1 Part 9A – Objective 3.2 IPSec VPNs Part 9B – Objective 3.2 SSL VPNs […]
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[…] Part 1 – Intro Part 2 – Objective 1.1 Part 3 – Objective 1.2 Part 4 – Objective 1.3 Part 5 – Objective 2.1 Part 6 – Objective 2.2 Part 7 – Objective 2.3 Part 8 – Objective 3.1 Part 9A – Objective 3.2 IPSec VPNs Part 9B – Objective 3.2 SSL VPNs Part 9C – Objective 3.3 L2 VPNs […]
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[…] Part 1 – Intro Part 2 – Objective 1.1 Part 3 – Objective 1.2 Part 4 – Objective 1.3 Part 5 – Objective 2.1 Part 6 – Objective 2.2 Part 7 – Objective 2.3 Part 8 – Objective 3.1 Part 9A – Objective 3.2 IPSec VPNs Part 9B – Objective 3.2 SSL VPNs Part 9C – Objective 3.2 L2 VPNs Part 10 – Objective 3.3 […]
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[…] Part 1 – Intro Part 2 – Objective 1.1 Part 3 – Objective 1.2 Part 4 – Objective 1.3 Part 5 – Objective 2.1 Part 6 – Objective 2.2 Part 7 – Objective 2.3 Part 8 – Objective 3.1 Part 9A – Objective 3.2 IPSec VPNs Part 9B – Objective 3.2 SSL VPNs Part 9C – Objective 3.2 L2 VPNs Part 10 – Objective 3.3 Part 11 – Objective 4.1 […]
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[…] Part 1 – Intro Part 2 – Objective 1.1 Part 3 – Objective 1.2 Part 4 – Objective 1.3 Part 5 – Objective 2.1 Part 6 – Objective 2.2 Part 7 – Objective 2.3 Part 8 – Objective 3.1 Part 9A – Objective 3.2 IPSec VPNs Part 9B – Objective 3.2 SSL VPNs Part 9C – Objective 3.2 L2 VPNs Part 10 – Objective 3.3 Part 11 – Objective 4.1 Part 12 – Objective 4.2 […]
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[…] Part 1 – Intro Part 2 – Objective 1.1 Part 3 – Objective 1.2 Part 4 – Objective 1.3 Part 5 – Objective 2.1 Part 6 – Objective 2.2 Part 7 – Objective 2.3 Part 8 – Objective 3.1 Part 9A – Objective 3.2 IPSec VPNs Part 9B – Objective 3.2 SSL VPNs Part 9C – Objective 3.2 L2 VPNs Part 10 – Objective 3.3 Part 11 – Objective 4.1 Part 12 – Objective 4.2 Part 13 – Objective 5.1 […]
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[…] Part 1 – Intro Part 2 – Objective 1.1 Part 3 – Objective 1.2 Part 4 – Objective 1.3 Part 5 – Objective 2.1 Part 6 – Objective 2.2 Part 7 – Objective 2.3 Part 8 – Objective 3.1 Part 9A – Objective 3.2 IPSec VPNs Part 9B – Objective 3.2 SSL VPNs Part 9C – Objective 3.2 L2 VPNs Part 10 – Objective 3.3 Part 11 – Objective 4.1 Part 12 – Objective 4.2 Part 13 – Objective 5.1 Part 14 – Objective 5.2 […]
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[…] Introduction to the series and lab environment […]
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[…] you read over my first blog post in this series you will know that my lab is running on VMware vCloud Director (vCD) that uses NSX […]
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