Everything-Virtual

Category: Certification

  • VCAP 5.5 DCA Exam Passed And Study Hints and Tips

    Over the last couple of years I have seen friends sit various VCAP exams and tell me their experiences of them (nothing NDA breaking) and I always thought to myself that it wasn’t for me, please don’t misunderstand, I am someone who would love to get his VCDX but I have never been in a role that would give me the Design credentials to attempt the VCDX. I also thought that I wasn’t really ready for the VCAP exam, I then had a chat with a friend of mine who has a number of VCAP’s \ VCIX exams under his belt and he told me that in his opinion I am more than capable of passing the VCAP and I should just book it.

     

    So I did, on the 6th of June I booked the VCAP 5.5 DCA exam for the 4th of July, this left me with just 4 weeks to study for the exam, something I hadn’t even considered yet.

    With 4 short weeks of study (I got laid off 3.5 weeks ago) I sat the exam on the 4th of July and can honestly say it’s a fair but tough exam.

    The three hours went super fast, the 5 minute warning came around sooner than I thought.

    23 questions attempted but I know I missed at least 4 so it was always going to be a tough thing.

    30 minutes after leaving the test centre I got the email from VMware, all I can say is it was closer than I could ever imagine but needless to say a pass is a pass and I am now VCAP 5.5 certified.
    My tips for anyone studying the exam.

    Read the various guides out there (VCAP Diaries and vCrooky). Watch the Pluralsight Optimise and Scale courses, still very relevant today as when released. Also watch the Advanced Networking and the Troubleshooting videos if you can. Remember that the BluePrint is key, if it’s mentioned in there it’s fair game.

    Esxcli esxcli command list | grep "word" is your friend. Also use advanced search in the acrobat reader and locate all documents from the desktop.

    Hands on lab experience is key, whether you have access to a home lab or Dev environment or use a laptop with AutoDeploy you’re going to need hands on experience with more than just vSphere, install and configure VCO and PowerCLI, use whichever interface you’re comfortable with (C#, Web or CLI) although you will need to open up the Web client for some of the tasks (open up multiple browser sessions). 

    Good luck all and know it’s possible.

  • VMware Academy Training Experience – vSphere 6 ICM Course with 360GSP

    Over the years I have 360gspexperienced a lot of VMware training, whether that’s been with a VMware VATC (VMware Approved Training Centre), Directly with VMware or via the VMware Academy route.

    My previous VCP 4 and 5 training has been carried out via the Academy route and rarely differed from the usual VATC provided training, the only difference between the Academy and VATC’s in the past was that the Academy could offer weekend training dates and also lasted 8 days instead of the usual 5 days.

    In previous times training with an Academy still meant that you had to sign up for the class on the MyLearn VMware site, had to attend all the lessons and be signed off the class by the instructor, you also received a heavily discounted voucher for the VCP exam and a reasonable time to sit that exam. Again training with a VATC only provided the course attendance and no discounted VCP voucher. This time around I discovered that there has been a change to the way that the course attendance is marked and also an additional benefit that all students should use to aid in their study and understanding of the technology.

    (more…)

  • VCP-NV (VCPN610) Exam Passed

    I first attended the VMware NSX ICM Course last year with the excellent Paul McSharry as my instructor, unfortunately NSX took a back seat as far as a technology stack was concerned so I kept putting taking the exam, then a couple of weeks ago I was given the chance to go on a refresher course and it gave me back the bug to sit down and study something with an intensity that I haven’t had for a while now.

     

    Now by this time the VCP-NV exam has matured and there were a number of different study guides, I used the excellent guide from Rich Dowling as well as various #vBrownBag videos available covering the VCP-NV Exam BluePrint and not forgetting the excellent Pluralsight Videos covering NSX by Jason Nash.

     

    I booked the older VCPN610 exam which contained 120 questions rather than the 2V0-641 exam which covers 85 questions because all the training I had done previously was done on the older 6.0 training material, however the old exam is due to expire at the end of November. The good thing is that everyone who passes the VCPN610 exam get’s grandfathered to the VCP6-NV.

    All told I would say that I have spent the last month really pushing my revision to pass this exam, sure it’s only the VCP and I have to admit that some of the material was over the top for the VCP level exam but it does make me feel better for trying the VCIX exam sometime next year.

    My advice is to definitely use multiple sources for training, use each to backup what you’re being told because you can never have enough reference points.

  • VCP6-Cloud Exam Blueprint Downloadable Documents Bundle

    As preparation for the VCP6-Cloud study Guide I downloaded all of the documents mentioned in the blueprint and decided to put them in to an easily downloadable bundle for everyone else to download.

    The zip file contains folders for each section\objective and contains some duplications but for the most part shared files for each section can be found under the common files folder in that section folder.

    The file can be downloaded here

  • VCP6-DCV Exam Blueprint Downloadable Documents Bundle

    As preparation for my VCP6-DCV study Guide I downloaded all of the documents mentioned in the blueprint and decided to put them in to an easily downloadable bundle for everyone else to download.

    The zip file contains folders for each objective and contains some duplications but for the most part shared files for each objective can be found under the common files folder in that section folder.

    The file can be downloaded here

  • VCP5-DCV (VCP550) Exam Blueprint Downloadable Documents Bundle

    As preparation for my VCP5-DCV (VCP-550) study Guide I downloaded all of the documents mentioned in the blueprint and decided to put them in to an easily downloadable bundle for everyone else to download.

    The zip file contains folders for each objective and contains some duplications but for the most part shared files for each objective can be found under the common files folder in that objective folder.

    The file can be downloaded here

  • VCP-NV Exam Blueprint Downloadable Documents Bundle

    As preparation for my VCP-NV study Guide I downloaded all of the documents mentioned in the blueprint and decided to put them in to an easily downloadable bundle for everyone else to download.

    The zip file contains folders for each objective and contains some duplications but for the most part shared files for each objective can be found under the common files folder in that objective folder.

    The file can be downloaded here

  • VCAP5-DCA (VDCA550) Downloadable Documents Bundle

    As preparation for my VCAP5 DCA study Guide I downloaded all of the documents mentioned in the blueprint and decided to put them in to an easily downloadable bundle for everyone else to download.

    The Blueprint Docs folder contains some duplications but for the most part shared files for each objective can be found under the common files folder in that objective folder.

    The Exam Docs folder contains the missing documents that weren’t downloaded as part of the Blueprint Docs but mentioned as being present in the exam.

    The file can be downloaded here

  • VMware Certification 2015 Road Map

    With the release of vSphere 6 yesterday VMware have now also released their road map for 2015 on their certification offerings.

    As expected there is the new VCP6 DCV exam but it’s also no surprise that the recently announced VCIX has made further in roads and replaced the VCAP exams across the board.

    We also see a renaming of both the Cloud Certification and Desktop Tracks, these are now known as the CMA (Cloud Management & Automation) and DTM (Desktop & Mobility) Tracks respectively.

     

    Cert_Roadmap_2015Q1_v5_final_WEB

    More information can be found at https://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrReg/plan.cfm?plan=62402&ui=www_cert#key

  • My NSX: Install, Configure, Manage [v6.0] Experiences

    nsxThis past week I was fortunate enough to have attended the VMware NSX 6.0 Install Configure, Manage (ICM) course run by VMware at the Global Knowledge offices in London. The instructor for the course was the great Paul McSharry, author and fellow vExpert so I knew we were in good hands from an instructor point of view.

    The course is designed as a 5 day course but in actual fact I believe that the course could have been run over 4 days instead – especially with decent working labs.. more on that one later.

    One of the things concerning me from talking to a colleague of mine who recently sat and passed the VMware NSX VCIX exam was that this was definitely more networking orientated than I was used to and I wondered if this was the right course for me, it’s definitely aimed at guys with decent networking backgrounds (and in fact it was recommended that I also look at the Cisco CCNA Data Centre as an exam to help broaden my experience with data centre networking).

    In hindsight I would have been better off to have sat through the VMware Network Virtualisation Fundamentals and the Pluralsight VMware NSX for vSphere – Introduction and Installation courses prior to attending but obviously hindsight is a wonderful thing Smile

    The course was pretty much broken down to a 50/50 split of instructor led and hands on lab sessions and this is where things started to fall down Sad smile.

    VMware have decided to take the newer VMware training away from the VATCs and host it themselves, so instead of utilising the training providers vSphere infrastructure you’re using VMware’s Labs, which in the case of the NSX course appear to be US based (anyone who has done the VCAP Admin exams will have experienced the laggy environments before). US based Labs aren’t such a bad thing if you’re not running 3 or 4 concurrent training courses around the world. In our case we were not only contending with our own local students but also students from other classes around the world (at least 3 NSX ICM courses were being run this week in Europe).

    With multiple courses being run concurrently speed and reliability of the lab environments left a lot to be desired, in fact we tended to find that the instructor led portion of our training was carried out in the morning to see if the other classes who finished before us meant we had a better responding lab environment (it didn’t).

    Next up was the age and reliability of the environment, I understand that the NSX: ICM [v6.0] course is being run on 6.0 of the NSX product and not on the newer 6.1 release (with 6.1 having been released back on the 11th of September and 6.1.2 having been released on the 4th of December) I would have liked to have seen the course updated to a newer release of the 6.0 track instead of running on 6.0.2, especially as there were issues highlighted back in July 2014 on the Beta courses that are still active now.

    Finally my lab experienced a failure that would have taken longer to fix (remove all the NSX components, create a new standard switch, migrate off the distributed switch, delete and recreate the whole kit and caboodle again) so I had to start using a fresh lab, oh and this was on day 3 of 5 so whilst my peers were doing labs 10+ I had to start again from lab 1 and that unfortunately meant I struggled for the rest of the course (I was doing lab 13 when I decided to call it a day at the end of the course on day 5).

    All in all of the 14 students on my course not one of them went a day without some kind of performance issue, luckily I was the only to experience a complete lab failure so I was the only one who didn’t actually manage to finish the labs.

    Final thoughts were that this really should still have been classified as a beta course (it wasn’t) because the course was quite possibly the worst performing course I have attended in a while (even worse than the vCloud Director 1.5 course I attended that was nearly cancelled 50% of the way through due to poor performance) and as such I hope that VMware improve their offering for future delegates because I know that we weren’t the only course to have experienced issues (and not just this time either).

    I will be posting more material covering my experiences with the VCP-NV as I plan on taking that quite soon