Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vcap

VCDX is back, but can I upgrade from the retired VCDX to the revamped VCDX?

· · Leave a Comment

Last week at Explore On Tour in Frankfurt, there were a number of announcements! One of those announcements was about the VCDX program, yes, it is back! Please, don’t call it a comeback, as it is not back in its original form! The certification is now called VMware Certified Distinguished Expert, and has a slightly different focus, and I quote:

We are thrilled to announce the evolution of this iconic program, expanding its reach beyond traditional focus on design roles to welcome a broader range of elite VMware professionals: Architects, Administrators, and Support specialists.

I personally think this is a welcome change, as it allows more people to reach that next level. Now of course, this immediately raises a question: what if I am already a VCDX? My title is “VMware Certified Design Expert”, do I need to start from scratch? There has been some confusion around this, and that is not strange, as the new track is being developed as we speak.

However, I asked a few folks internally who are involved, and they told me that they are trying to figure out what an upgrade path would look like and how that would work. Of course, that means there are no guarantees at this point, but to me it feels like the intention is there to enable current VCDX’s to upgrade to VMware Certified Distinguished Expert. What, if, how, and when, all of that is to be seen at this stage. When I find out more, I will report back!

VMware HA Deployment Best Practices

· ·

Last week VMware officially released an official paper around Deployment Best Practices for HA. I was one of the authors of the document. Together with several people from the Technical Marketing Team we gathered all best practices that we could find, validated and simplified them to make it rock solid. I think it is a good read. It is short and sweet and I hope you will enjoy it.

Latest Revision:
Dec 9, 2010

Download:
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMW-Server-WP-BestPractices.pdf

Description

This paper describes best practices and guidance for properly deploying VMware HA in VMware vSphere 4.1.  These include discussions on proper network and storage design, and recommendations on settings for host isolation response and admission control.

VCAP-DCA Exam

· ·

I was “fortunate” enough to be part of the group of people who were invited to do the VCAP-DCA exam. Some of the others like Jason Boche and William Lam who recently did this exam already shared their experience. The VCAP-DCA Exam is the follow up to the VI-3 Enterprise Exam which I passed two years ago as part of my VCDX Journey. I must say that my experience was different than some others mentioned. No lag, no overlay issues… everything worked perfectly well. I guess one thing to keep in mind when you experience issues like that is that this exam is still beta, there is a reason there is a beta period even for exams!

Of course I can’t share any specifics with you regarding the questions as the VMware Certification Team would have to kill me if I would. However I do want to stress, and I guess that Jason and William had a similar experience, that this was seriously one of the most difficult tests I have done so far. The range of products (vCenter, ESX, vMA, vShield, Orchestrator, PowerCLI, Heartbeat) is huge which makes it really difficult to prepare for this exam. Keep in mind though that no one expects you to know the full range of products in-depth, but they do expect you to know how to solve things or how to set-up things. This could be particularly difficult with products like vShield, Orchestrator and Heartbeat. For me particularly this was a challenge as I tend to focus more on the architectural side these days, I guess being a technical consultant / implementation specialist would definitely help!

I guess the one reason you are reading this article is to make sure you prep well, here are some tips:

  1. Read the VCAP-DCA blueprint!
  2. L A B T I M E. Make sure you get enough time to spent in your lab. I can’t stress this enough as the test is 95% Lab based as opposed to the VI3 Enterprise exam which was roughly 40% Lab based.
  3. Make sure you are familiar with vMA, PowerCLI, ESX, vCenter(and all the features like vDS, vSwitches, Host Profiles, VUM etc…), Heartbeat, Orchestrator, vDR and all the rest that you can think off.
  4. Make sure you are familiar with the command line:
    1. esxcfg-* commands or the vMA equivalents (vicfg-*)
    2. esxcli
    3. PowerCLI
    4. vifp
    5. vmware-cmd
  5. Did I already mention Lab Time?

VCAP4-DCA Exam?

· ·

Got a couple of questions around this over the last few days and wanted to clear it up. The VCAP4-DCA (Datacenter Administrator) is 100% LAB based. For those who did the VI3 Enterprise Exam it will be similar to the second part of the exam.

In other words you will receive multiple tasks and you will get a full vSphere environment to your disposal including Service Console access, vSphere Client and vCenter. Just get the job done! It could be configuring a Distributed vSwitch or even troubleshooting and solving a problem…

In terms of preparations, make sure you have had enough LAB time. Start using the “esxcfg-” commands and make sure you know where to find what within the vSphere Client.