My VCAP-DCD Review
It's been a busy few months with my little girl Sadie arriving (she is smiling now), I haven't had much time to post.
I recently passed the VCAP-DCD exam and thought I would jot down a few words about my experience.
A few study tips,
Study the recommended reading from the exam blueprint. The blueprint gives very high level subject titles, with links to numerous guides and references. I would recommend reading them all at least once before taking the exam.
You may notice that the majority of the documents are also recommended reading for the VCP level certification. You may find your self reading content you feel you understand very well. This make very dry reading, I must admit.
One tip is to try and see past the technical facts and look at the impact if the settings or functionality is implemented in a certain way. For example, it is easy to memorise the requirements for vMotion, it is useful knowledge, however for this exam, consider things such as , what is the impact of guest virtual machines not meeting these vMotion requirements, will the cluster become imbalanced, what is the importance of initial guest placement? I found by considering the content in this way, my designs would avoid these issues and I would be asking myself useful questions. During the exam this helped me spot obvious trouble spots.
Know the VMware design terminology. Technical knowledge is great but this test also requires you to understand business's requirements. If you haven't got experience of design work, I would recommend the vSphere design workshop. This course covers a lot of the content in 3 days. It won't cover it all, however it will give you the approach, terminology and show you the mindset you need to be in to ask the design type questions when reading requirements.
Read around the technology, I spent a lot of my study time just reading case studies from various vendors.
The exam is based on 4.1 , make sure you know the new features if it has been awhile since you did the VCP course.
Make sure your general IT knowledge is refreshed, i.e. Basic raid levels, link speeds, What is the difference between redundancy, DR and backup – normal operational management stuff, but all from a design perspective.
Resources I used.
- Blueprint and associated links (Scott Crookson has kindly placed them in one file for easy download)
- Case studies
- vSphere design by Scott Lowe et al
- Ha & DRS Technical Deepdive by Duncan Epping
- Workshop design guide
Exam Tips
There are 113 questions, they range from multiple choice to visio type design questions. The method I used was to read through all questions answering the ones I thought I could answer straightaway. From here I took a deep breath and concentrated on the longer questions.
Time management is key, there is a lot to read, however looking for the useful information is a good tip, get to the point – just like in real life.
One last tip is to make sure you watch the Official exam demo, this gives a tutorial on how to use the design tool for the longer questions. I would recommend this, it takes away the scare factor when you are faced with the tool in the exam.
Good luck to anyone taking the VCAP-DCD , in my humble opinion it is a worthwhile exam, it is pretty tough, but very possible to crack.
Updated VCP Practice Test to vSphere 5
My practice tests are the most popular part of my little blog. With the release of vSphere and a new VCP, I will be releasing several tests of the next few weeks.
These tests along with the config max practice tests will hopefully help with VCP study.
I will gradually update the links and navigation to my site. Until then my first VCP 5 Practice Test link is shown below
VCP vSphere 5 – Practice Test 1 – 19 Questions
Feel free to send any comments, questions, corrections – or just say Hi :>
Now vSphere 5 is GA and the VCP 5 exam is available. Its time to start working towards migrations and another VCP exam sitting.
As part of my preparation I always try to know the configuration maximums guide.
I have created a series of practice tests based on the latest copy of the guide to help with my study. I hope you find them useful.
I will be adding the rest of the guide aspects over the next few days.
VCP vSphere 5 – Configuration Maximums Test 1 – 21 Questions
VCP vSphere 5 – Configuration Maximums Test 2 – 25 Questions
VCP vSphere 5 – Configuration Maximums Test 3 – 21 Questions
VCP vSphere 5 – Configuration Maximums Test 4 – 20 Questions
I recently had a request regarding a quick method to shutdown /power off / power on all guest virtual machines in the datacenter except the virtual vCenter.
A simple process using powercli is shown below,
First specify all the powered on guests using a variable, then exclude the name of the virtual vCenter
e.g Where virtual vCenter name = vCenter01
$vms = get-vm | where {$_.PowerState -eq "poweredon"} | Where-Object {"vCenter01" -notcontains $_.Name}
Now the guests to be controlled have been identified the following commands can be used
get-vm Lists specified guests
Shutdown-VMGuest $vms This will gracefully powerdown the machines using VMware Tools service.
stop-vm $vms This will poweroff the guest machines ungracefully (i.e pulling out power)
start-vm $vms This will power on the same set of virtual machines.
Standard vSwitch Build Script
Host profiles and distributed switches provide excellent functionality for automation.
However a large number of sys admins may not have access to these features due to requiring a more expensive Enterprise plus licence of vSphere.
Even with a couple of hosts, the network configuration can become tedious in the GUI and in some cases (ie vMotion and case sensitive port group names), a typo can cause your solution extreme problems.
The below network script can be copied and pasted into a ssh session on a host which has just been installed with a management/service console port assumed on vswitch 0.
With a handful of hosts, this script can be edited to include specific IP information and saved for each host as part of a larger build script.
## Create Additional standard vSwitches ##
esxcfg-vswitch -a vSwitch1
esxcfg-vswitch -a vSwitch2##Link physical Nics to vSwitches ——–Confirm Nics ports on host
esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch1 -L vmnic2
esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch1 -L vmnic3
esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch2 -L vmnic4
esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch2 -L vmnic5## Create VMkernal port for vMotion ———- Unique IP config for host
esxcfg-vswitch -A "VMotion" vSwitch1
esxcfg-vmknic -a -i 192.168.90.12 -n 255.255.255.0 VMotion## Create port groups
esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch1 -A vMotion_vlan
esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch2 -A web_vlan
esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch2 -A app_vlan
esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch2 -A dmz_vlan
esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch2 -A UAT_vlan
esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch2 -A man_vlan
esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch2 -A Storage_vlan## Assign vlans
esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch1 -p vMotion_vlan -v 90
esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch2 -p web_vlan -v 30
esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch2 -p app_vlan -v 40
esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch2 -p dmz_vlan -v 50
esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch2 -p UAT_vlan -v 60
esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch2 -p man_vlan -v 70
esxcfg-vswitch vSwitch2 -p Storage_vlan -v 80
HI,
I'm Paul McSharry, a Technical Consultant and trainer from London.
This is my website dedicated to Virtualisation technologies.
Elastic Sky is my attempt to bring together information from working in the field, & leading training courses.
