RCDPRKR Certified DataCenter Professional

Build the modern datacenter fabric from the ground up: a 3-stage Clos IP underlay using eBGP unnumbered (RFC 5549-style) with ECMP and BFD, then a VXLAN data plane driven by an MP-BGP EVPN control plane. You will work hands-on with EVPN route types 1 through 5 on both Cisco Nexus 9000v (NX-OS) and vJunos-switch, comparing ingress replication against multicast underlay for BUM traffic and dissecting real VXLAN packets on the wire.

Turn a flat overlay into a real multi-tenant service platform. This module covers symmetric IRB with per-VRF L3VNIs, distributed anycast gateways, and RD/RT numbering schemes that survive multi-pod growth, then extends tenants across sites with EVPN Type-5 DCI through border leaves. Controlled route leaking for shared services and hard isolation proofs are graded, not assumed.

Master the application-centric alternative to box-by-box configuration: APIC-driven fabrics where tenants, application profiles, EPGs, bridge domains, and contracts define connectivity as policy. You will build L3Outs with OSPF and BGP peering to the outside world, integrate a VMM domain with vCenter, and learn to debug the fabric the way TAC does — through health scores, the fault lifecycle, moquery, and the REST object model.

Operate the fabric by intent instead of by CLI: Apstra device profiles, logical devices, rack types, and templates compile into a deployable EVPN-VXLAN blueprint whose rendered configuration you can inspect line by line. The module goes deep on day-2 reality — routing zones, connectivity templates, intent-based analytics (IBA) probes, drift detection, and staged changes with full rollback.

Datacenter fabrics increasingly carry the storage, not just the app traffic. This module covers the NVMe-oF family — NVMe/TCP and NVMe/RoCEv2 — against the iSCSI and Fibre Channel incumbents: queue models, discovery controllers, ANA multipathing, and what each transport demands from the network. You will design dedicated storage segments (VRF separation, MTU 9216, QoS marking) and benchmark them honestly with fio.

The on-ramp to AI and high-performance storage fabrics: why RDMA traffic over RoCEv2 (UDP 4791) cannot tolerate drops, and how PFC no-drop classes, buffer headroom, ECN/WRED marking, and DCQCN congestion control combine to deliver lossless behavior on ordinary Ethernet. Equal weight is given to the failure modes — PFC storms, head-of-line blocking, and the watchdog and monitoring discipline that keeps them contained.

The professional fabric is deployed from a source of truth, not typed at a prompt. Build a fabric-as-code pipeline: YAML intent rendered through Jinja2 and deployed with Ansible to NX-OS and Junos, ACI provisioned idempotently over REST from Python, and every change gated by pre/post validation with Nornir/NAPALM or pyATS in CI. Close the loop with gNMI/OpenConfig streaming telemetry feeding Grafana dashboards and alerts.

A timed, graded rehearsal of the RCDP practical exam. From a written requirements document, design and build a greenfield fabric — underlay, two EVPN tenants with symmetric IRB and Type-5 DCI, an ACI application segment, a PFC/ECN storage class, and one change delivered through the automation pipeline. Then survive the fault gauntlet: ten injected failures spanning every layer, scored on time-to-restore and the quality of your root-cause notes, followed by a design defense.