Six weeks has passed really fast and the exam is due tomorrow! I think that now it is time to recap what I have learned and how well I know exam goals. I took the main items from blueprint and I try to do some self-assessment.
VCAP-DCD Blueprint objectives & skills
| Recognize requirements, constraints, risks and assumptions & understand business requirements | There is lot of information and links to documents to good material on subject. Also VMware vSphere Design book covers lot on this subject. I think I know this subject pretty well. |
| Virtualizing of business critical applications (Oracle, Exchange, SQL, SAP and Java) |
This is one of my favorite subjects. I have before virtualiazed Oracle, SQL and SQL plus I have run & managed quite a few Enterprise Java apps. Yeah, I think I know this part well. |
| Design phases: Conceptual, Logical and Physical | I find conceptual design quite abstract and it is probably hardest part in the exam for me. Logical and physical design are much more concrete to me and probably easier. |
| Transforming business requirements to the logical design | This one is quite interesting and I’m looking forward to see how VMware is going to test it in the exam. Blueprint points out skills like “Create a Service Catalog” from ITIL. Places where I have worked we have done things in the spirit of ITIL but we have not encfored ITIL standards stricly. This one can be quite hard for me – We’ll see it tomorrow. |
| Service dependencies mapping & relatations | I have good hunch of infrastructure services (DNS, AD, DHCP) as well as VMware services. One thing that I will need to reread is VMware Auto deploy service. I have not used Auto deploy in production and there is long time since I have tested it in lab environment. |
| Availability requirements | I have worked long time in very demanding environment where 24/7 operation is must. VMware have greatly helped us to build redundant infrastructure so VMware HA tools are very familiar. I think that I have very sound understanding of HA and FT. One thing I will try to look more is VMware Metro Cluster setups. There are not many links on the subject in the blueprint and I think I could read more about this. |
| Manageability requirements | This is another quite abstract subject in the blueprint and leans heavily to the ITIL. I know and understand the concept but I am not overly confident in this subject. Main problem is that I find it hard to find more information on this area. |
| Performance requirements | Performance management is another of my favorite subjects in the VMware so I am not worried of this. |
| Recoverability requirements | Business continuity and disaster recovery is an interesting subject. I don’t have much experience on this sector and I watched SRM and vSphere Replication videos from Pluralsight. On the backup front, I have not used vSphere Data Protection solution (I have mostly used Backup Exec for backups) so questions regarding it can be tricky. |
| Security requirements | Interesting and broad subject, let’s see how they test this in the exam. |
| Transition from a logical to a physical design | I think that physical design is one of my strong areas so I am not overly concerned of this. |
| Physical network design | I have strong networking background so STP, Jumbo Frames, Load-balacing and Trunking are easy part for me. Blueprint mentions AMPRS which I don’t have a clue what it is. Problem with distributed switches are that they can be deployed many ways and what ways are considered correct by the exam evaluation. |
| Storage design | Storage design is another huge subject and there are multiple technologies which you need to know thoroughly. I have been mainly used FC storage technologies so I have firm background there. iSCSI and NFS technologies are familiar from lab environments.VMware technologies mentioned in the blueprint are RDM, SIOC (Storage I/O Control), Storage Policies and Storage vMotion & DRS which all are quite simple and easy to understand. |
| Compute requirements and VM configuration | VMware vSphere Design book explains pretty well scale up and scale out strategies. VM configuration section is quite closely related to “Virtualizing business critical applications”. |
| vCenter management | I have used vCSA (vCenter Server Appliance) for some time now and I know it pretty well. vCenter Server Heartbeat and Linked mode technologies in the other hand is relatively unknown technologies for me. |
| Validation & Implementation Plans | These sections sound quite theoretical in blueprint and I founded quite hard to study these sections. There is not much linked material either. |
Tomorrow I’ll see how right or wrong I was with my “self-assessment”. Right now I feel confident for passing but as many have said in the VMware community site – This is really hard exam to pass.