We are pleased to welcome you to the 2nd symposium dedicated to PhD students which is taking place during the 7th IEEE NFV-SDN conference. The NFV-SDN Doctoral Symposium is committed to fostering collaboration amongst PhD students and experts from all communities researching and working in the areas of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networks (SDN). It offers a unique opportunity for PhD students to present their latest research results, discuss new research ideas, and to gather valuable expert feedback on their work from experienced researchers from both industry and academia. Moreover, it is a place for mentoring and to get in touch with student peers working in the same field. The Doctoral Symposium runs two tracks. One track is targeted at PhD students at the beginning of their work when they have a well-defined problem statement and are developing their ideas on how to approach the challenges. The other track targets contributions from PhD students at a more advanced stage to present their research results and share insights coming from their experience which might help others to progress their work. We received a total of 8 submissions of which three early-stage and one later-stage contributions were selected for presentation. The selected papers are organized in two sessions addressing current hot topics ranging from configuration of time-sensitive networks, disaggregated virtual network functions, service chaining and zero-touch network management.