Cisco Advanced Services Education (ASE) offers hands-on, solutions-based training for building virtualized cloud-based data centers. The courses deal with current data center design strategies such as cloud computing, virtualization and unified fabric. Using the Cisco Nexus, UCS and MDS families of products, students construct a highly available and modular data center infrastructure. Courses cover the configuration of the Cisco Nexus 7000 and 5000 Series switches as well as the Cisco Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extenders. Content also covers how to connect VMware vSphere ESX based virtual machines to the data center infrastructure, including the configuration of a data center unified fabric using both Fibre Channel and Fibre Channel over Ethernet. Best practices for configuring VMware virtual switching and network redundancy are also included. In addition, the lecture and labs cover how to configure both VMware VMotion and Storage VMotion to enable data center virtual machine mobility. Finally, labs and lessons are available to help students scale a data center Layer 2 environment using Cisco FabricPath and Overlay Transport Virtualization technology.
