Cloud Director in action: how service providers train smarter

VMware Cloud Director (VCD) is a leading cloud service delivery platform. It enables cloud providers and enterprises to manage, isolate and sell virtualised infrastructure.

It works by abstracting the underlying VMware vSphere resources – namely, compute, storage and networking. These become isolated virtual data centres (VDCs – not to be confused with VCD itself).

The result is multi-tenant Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). It's often used for Kubernetes cluster management and the migration of existing vSphere workloads to a virtualised cloud environment.

This is niche stuff. To use VCD to its full capacity, it must be managed and administrated by trained-up professionals. And you can't have trained-up professionals without training.

Training, of course, is an investment that requires time, money and goodwill. These expenses make it natural for companies to want reassurance that the training in question will do the job.

Here at Ascend Cloud Solutions, we provide lab hosting services for VEDP courses. These are VMware-authorised courses that cover the whole VMware portfolio – from vSphere to vSAN, from vCenter to Cloud Director.

So, how can VEDP courses help providers train smarter – and what does a Cloud Director course look like in action?

The safety of the sandbox

Perhaps the most significant shift in education over the last, say, 20 years has been the rise and rise of virtual training.

Of course, it wasn't a straightforward changeover from pen, paper and chalk to online classrooms. Along the way, physical classrooms began to incorporate new technologies like smart boards and online submissions.

The change can't be overstated – especially in the realm of professional training.

Once upon a time, companies had to pay for more than just the course. They had to pay for the physical space, learning materials and, in some cases, travel and accommodation for learners. What's more, the learning had to happen all at once, disrupting workflows.

Today, learning can take place at the learner's own pace, and a class can be attended by people literally anywhere in the world.

This has obvious cost savings. But in many cases – including VEDP – it also has educational benefits.

Virtual sandbox environments allow users to break things safely and to repeat routine procedures until they become second nature. This means they emerge from the course both confident and proficient, able to hit the ground running and face any real-life challenge head-on.

VEDP's Cloud Director course is no different. Learners can get to grips with deploying, configuring and managing VCF 5.2 environments in real time, building confidence and expertise as they go.

VMware Cloud Director is a complex piece of software. So, it's no surprise that a typical training course will cover a lot of ground.

Depending on the course in question, learners are likely to cover:

Core deployment, architecture and design

Tenant and workload management

Networking and security

Advanced features and extensions

Core deployment, architecture and design

Within this topic, learners get to understand Cloud Director components, install and configure a high-availability Cloud Director cluster and define provider VDCs, orgs and resource pools.

Tenant and workload management

Under this banner comes the creation and management of tenant organisations and VDCs, VMs, vApps and catalogues for VM templates and media. It also covers the configuration of VM sizing, placement and auto-scale groups.

Networking and security

Networking and security are key offerings of Cloud Director. Students learn to manage on-demand networking using VMware NSX, configure edge networking, integrate with VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer and configure role-based access control (RBAC).

Advanced features and extensions

Finally, a Cloud Director course will cover advanced features and extensions, such as:

Disaster recovery solutions

API access

Container service extensions

Object storage extensions

Chargeback for monitoring costs

Using VMware Aria Operations for monitoring cloud objects

Why hands-on learning still matters

It's worth repeating that all of this knowledge is acquired through hands-on learning. The only difference between the virtual classroom sandbox and the real world is the fact that nothing can be broken or disrupted in the sandbox.

What's more, the virtual nature of the learning environment means that both feedback and troubleshooting are instantaneous.

The instructor can jump in and steer or correct learners, while the backstage team can fix any bugs as they occur. This contributes to a frictionless experience and ensures both instructors and learners can make the most of the educational environment.

How we can help

At Ascend Cloud Solutions, we provide highly reliable and highly secure lab hosting services for VEDP courses. That includes VMware Cloud Director: Deploy, Configure, Manage [v10.6].

This five-day course gives learners the expertise and practice they need to deploy, configure and manage VCF 5.2 environments.

The course is primarily designed for staff who need to use VMware Cloud Director, be they cloud administrators, system administrators or service provider engineers. It covers:

Certificate management and security
High availability and resilience
Aria Suite integration
Licensing models and entitlement management
Lifecycle management and upgrade processes
Storage and network configuration and management
Troubleshooting common issues
VCF architecture and design
Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA

Our expertise – and our history working closely with the VMware software suite – mean that our lab hosting services prioritise high availability and reliability. And if anything goes wrong, we work tirelessly behind the scenes to fix the problem in real time.