SDDC Consulting LiVefire course

Last Monday, I attended the first day of the five day VMware SDDC Consulting LiVefire course at their offices in Staines, England.

The course is designed to accelerate the readiness of VMware Partners in the design and implementation of Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) infrastructures. This is achieved by increasing confidence through advanced, expert-level solution training and guided “hands-on” labs.

Unlike other VMware training either delivered by VMware or its education partners; this is delivered by the VMware LiVefire, Solutions, and Services (LSS) team in conjunction with others from the larger Global Technical & Professional Services (GTPS) organization.

There is an expectation of product knowledge and/or experience. This is a Level 400 education course and though there were people new to virtualisation on the course, it is not an Install, Configure and Manage (ICM) course. It is intended to equip partners with the knowledge and skills to implement and deliver complex SDDC solutions through deep-dive, expert-to-expert training. All people are vetted and credentials are reviewed prior to seat confirmation. The overview of the course reads that it includes “architectural overviews, workshops, customer use-cases, and extensive hands-on lab exercises.” …but the team themselves tailor the course taking into account the feedback from previous courses, so broadly speaking it will cover VMware’s SDDC offering, but the specifics will change from course to course.

The subjects covered for Staines 2016 course were:

• vRealize Automation Design and Deployment
• vRealize Automation Configuration
• vRealize Orchestrator Distributed Deployment
• vRealize Automation Extensibility
• vRealize Automation Integrations

Then an option of a Management track covering:

• Hybrid Cloud Extensibility
• vCloud Air + vRA Challenge Lab
• vRealize Business Standard Deployment
• Capacity and Performance Design and Deploy
• vRealize Operations Insight Suite

or a NSX Track covering (My Choice):

• NSX Architecture and Design
• Logical Distributed Routing
• Micro-segmentation
• Distributed Firewall
• NSX Service Composer
• BCDR for NSX
• NSX Extensibility for vRA
• NSX Operations
• NSX Troubleshooting

The course format and atmosphere was unlike an other course I have attended. The combination of peer-to-peer conversations and warts-and-all training from the team made for a great week. Though there was feedback given by me and others on how the course could have been improved, it should not take away the fact; I have come away from the course with more confidence in the design and implementation of SDDC infrastructures.