vFrank

I took the VCAP-DCA exam earlier this week in London. I live in Copenhagen so I had to travel there. When I booked my test there were no test centres in Denmark. Now there is, but I had already booked the flight and hotel so it was too late to change it.

I had booked my exam for Tuesday November 9th at 11.00am – I arrived early and after signing in, showing two different signed ID’s and getting my picture taken I was ready for the test. The test started with a survey where you rate yourself in respect to different vSphere topics. Scripting, storage, designing etc. After the survey the test started. I got a total of 34 live labs and I had 4 hours to do them all. English is not my native language so I got 30 minutes more than you US and UK guys. I was happy about that, that meant more time to solve the labs.

All of the live labs is done in the same enviroment, so don’t mess anything up. Some labs required you to have solved an earlier lab. My strategy for the exam was to solve all of the labs I knew to do quick and save the the ones I was not too sure about till the end. Time management is essential especially if you have 30 minutes less than me! When I got to the last lab and completed it, I had about 15 minutes left to go back to the labs, I had ether completely skipped or only half solved. I managed to solve 2 or 3 labs during that time. I had written down the labs I had not done / or completed during my first run. So I was able to quickly go back to them. It is not possible to mark a question as incomplete for later review so do it on paper. If you don’t do this you will have a hard time remembering what to go back to.

After the test I walked out of the room with a good feeling. I had solved a lot of labs but not all of them. I just hope it was enough. Hopefully I willfind out next week.

If you are doing the exam and want some tips here they are:

I hope I did enough to pass the test. If not the test revealed my weak points and I know what to improve. To anyone doing the test. Good luck!

My VCAP-DCA is booked for November 9th. In prepration for the course these links are worth checking out:

VCAP Blueprints: link

VCAP Live lab tutorial: link

VCAP-DCA Index: link

From the VCAP live lab tutorial they actually state that a lab enviroment consists of 1xESX, 1xESXi and 1xvCenter server. All labs will be completed in the same enviroment. So some labs require that you have solved the previous lab. At the moment the lab should be installed with 4.0 and not 4.1. This will change at a later date.

Looking through the tutorial I took the following screenshot. I think it gives some clue about what to expect.

I am trying to build my perfect VMworld schedule. It is hard with so many great sessions and content. The following sessions I am pretty sure will make it to my final schedule:

EA7726: Virtual Machines Outperforming Physical Machines – Crossing the Performance Barrier

TA7805: Tech Preview: Storage DRS

TA8233: Prioritizing Storage Resource Allocation in ESX Based Virtual Environments Using Storage I/O Control

TA8051: Infrastructure Technologies to Long Distance VMotion – What Is “VM Teleportation”?

TA6720: Troubleshooting using ESXTOP for Advanced Users

I would recommend you to find sessions with the “good” speakers. One of my favorite is Scott Drummonds, I am also looking forward to hearing Chad Sakac talking about long-distance vmotion. Kit Colbert usually have some memory sessions, I like him a lot too.

Last week I delivered another 3 days vSphere Manage for Performance course. The course was developed for ESX 4.0 but I felt confident that ESXi 4.1 would do the job.

One thing I really like about ESXi 4.1 is the options to enable SSH to the host from the vSphere client. (Configuration, Security Profile, Properties)

When you get SSH enabled you have direct access to the host. When you use your favorite SSH client (Mine is putty) and logon to the host you will have access to ESXTOP and vscsistats. Thats right, finally these two great tools is bundled with the default installation.