Sean Crookston

During the first VCAP-DCA Brownbag someone had posed the question, “Is there anything that can only be done via the command line, or the gui?” As noted earlier the exam is not going to dictate how you do something, so if you need to setup a new vSwitch you can use one of the CLI methods or the GUI. There are however some things that can only be done via the GUI or the CLI though.

At the time there was only a few things I could think of but since then I’ve though of a  few more things. If you’ve got more please add with your comments.

• iSCSI Port Binding/Multipathing – You must bind the VMkernel ports using the esxcli command
• Administering a dvSwitch must be done through the gui
• Enabling Fault Tolerance Logging for NIC must be done through the gui
• Scripted ESXi 4.0 installation is just not possible despite being listed in the blueprint(which is based on 4.1)
• Configuring SNMP for a standalone esx/esxi host must be done via the command line

Another thing I have been working on for my own studying that I soon will be posting are some mock lab questions. I’m thinking of posting a question of the day for the next few weeks until I take my exam, with a solution posted within a few days after. There are multiple ways to do many things so I would love to have your comments on each of the questions.

The test is listed as 225 minutes, which leaves you with just over 5 1/2 minute per question to complete the objective of the lab. While the documentation is going to be available on the desktop this seems to me that it will be of little to no benefit if you aren’t in practice and ready to execute quickly on some of these questions. In fact, of all the posts I’ve seen no one specifically mentions finishing the entire exam and most advise that they in fact did not finish.

Be on the lookout for the first mock lab question tomorrow.

• vscsiStats
• Another VCAP-DCA Post
• VCAP-DCA Mock Lab Q6
• VCAP-DCA Mock Lab Q4
• VCAP-DCA Mock Lab Q3
• VCAP-DCA Mock Lab Q2
• VCAP-DCA Mock Lab Q1
• Objective 9.3 – Configure vCenter Server Linked Mode
• Objective 9.2 – Plan and Execute Scripted Installations
• Objective 8.2 – Administer vCenter Orchestrator