Gap Analysis VCAP-DCD to VCDX
September 14, 2011 
Sean Crookston 
After now passing the VCAP-DCD now have to consider preparing for the VCDX. As I’ve started to think about it I’ve realized I’m going to need basically do a gap analysis of where I’m at now versus what constitutes a successful VCDX submission and then defense.
So what is the difference between someone who is a VCAP-DCD and a VCDX? A few critical things come to mind for me initially, but lets start out with what VMware defines them as on their certification page.
VCAP-DCD
The VCAP-DCD is directed toward IT Architects and Consulting Architects who are capable of designing VMware solutions in a multi-site, large enterprise environment. They have a deep understanding both of VMware core components and their relation to storage and networking, and also of datacenter design methodologies. They also possess knowledge of applications and physical infrastructure, as well as their relationship to the virtual infrastructure.
VCDX
VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) is the highest level of VMware certification. This elite group is comprised of design architects highly-skilled in VMware enterprise deployments and the program is designed for veteran professionals who want to validate and demonstrate their expertise in VMware virtual infrastructure.
One main difference of note above is consulting architects vs design architects, however this probably has very little bearing on differentiating between the two. Most importantly what stands out is that the VCDX program is designed for veteran professionals who wish to validate and demonstrate their experience. There is a clear definition here that according to VMware, they are expecting VCDX candidates to be those that are not only experienced, but can demonstrate their experience. Something we probably already knew here.
Now some things that come to mind when I start thinking about where someone goes from being a VCAP-DCD to preparing for a VCDX. These may not apply to everyone of course and these are just my opinions in some cases.
Every VCDX I know of is regularly participating in design exercises as part of their daily job and likely is a customer facing engineer. This is not to say that someone who is not the prior does not have a chance of successfully defending, but it means someone like myself who is an implementation engineer is likely at a slight disadvantage just based on not going through the motions of presenting and defending designs on a day-to-day basis. Additionally as Brian Rice has pointed out in his article on defending a fictitious design, it is important to think like an architect so throughout the process and up to the defense it will be important to play the role, even if you are not presently one.
Those who are regularly presenting to customers and in turn the VCDX panel need to be able to articulate their thoughts. They don’t just know things like the maximum number of servers in an MSCS cluster on vSphere or that you can’t VMotion these machines. They know that these things are constraints to any design and may either be acceptable or not based on the functional requirements of the customer. Additionally it is your job to justify your choices, just because you tell a customer or panelist your decision doesn’t mean it will not be questioned. In terms of the defense I have heard from many about your journey to the answer and not the answer itself.
Design Architects also know that all the information to a design is not going to be given to them. It is their job to meet the customers requirements, and to question and interview to get those requirements. Without doing so vital information will be left out and the design can be deemed a failure by the business.
There is obviously much more to it then that, so please share your thoughts below.
VCAP-DCD Tips and Exam Experience
This morning I successfully completed the VCAP-DCD exam and although I read about 30 people’s reviews on the exam, I was definitely not prepared for the questions that were asked, or rather I should say they were a bit different then I was expecting. Additionally this morning I wasn’t quite as focused as I would have liked to have been.
Without going into things that violate NDA ,I will say that certain things people recommended to focus on or complained about related to the beta were not mentioned or barely relevant. Additionally the drag and drop questions and the thoroughness of each question is something to be aware of. For me the most difficult thing to swallow was that many questions are multiple selections, and the questions are very thorough so at times it was hard to know for certain if I completely comprehended the scenario and successfully chose the right answers.
The best thing you can do to prepare for the exam is follow the blueprint and have experience analyzing environments and doing designs. Many have said the Design Workshop was great preparation for the exam and while I feel that course was great, there is not a correlation to any of the content of the course and the exam itself.Overall this makes for a difficult, but worthwhile credential to achieve.
Overall if you think you are ready, book the exam and go take it. If you do not think you ready then you probably need some more time/experience before you attempt this one.
Now on to contemplating the VCDX…
VMworld Experience Day 3 #VMworld
Day 3 was a busy one.
I attended a few sessions on vCenter Operations, SRM, and the VCDX defense panel.
I was eager to learn more about vCenter Operations and clarify some of its capabilities with tying into other management systems. In a nutshell vCenter Operations is not a management system, but rather an analytics system that takes advantage of your existing monitoring.
SRM is a product that I have used a few times before but was eager to learn more about the VM based replicated that could now provide a solution for some of our SMB customers without storage that already has the supported array based replication required by SRM 4.x One interesting thing now in the product include the ability to replicate from remote sites into a paired set of replicated nodes at the datacenter. Additionally I was eager to see more on the ease of replicating from a site to a dr in ‘the cloud’. With the current release this is now possible although has some limitations for the provider, such as a 10:1 vCenter to customer ratio. With VM based replication you are also limited to replicating 500 VMs.
The VCDX defense panel was the session I’ve looked forward to the most. Even though I’ve reviewed tips, notes, and the process as a whole I still walked away with a good amount of notes and tips to take back. The panel consisted of several VCDX members and a few people played the role of the candidate. It was pretty interesting to hear some of the comments and tips from the panelists and a few of the more important ones are directly below.
- Keep talking as your thinking or white boarding. The panel can’t read your mind despite popular belief.
- It’s not necessarily about the answer, but your journey to the answer in troubleshooting or designing. It is impossible to finish a complete design in 30 minutes.
- Be short and to the point, time is limited.
- Your never going to get 100% information from a customer, and you aren’t from the panel either. It is your job to ask questions.
- Every design decision you make has a potential impact on your design. Not only be aware of this but back to an earlier tip bring this to light.
Met a lot of new people again today, including several long time employees of VMware dating back to the beginning of 2000. Very interesting talking to those that have been there since the beginning. Looking forward to day 4.
VMworld Experience Day 2 #VMworld
The day started off with Steve Herrod presenting some of the finer details of the newly announced products, and particularly diving much deeper into their desktop virtualization products. There is a lot of information out there and you can catch the presentation for yourself if you haven’t already, so I won’t go into great detail but will say I am very excited about the offerings VMware is bringing to the table. The product line and strategy seems to match the mobile device age we are in and solve some of the pain points with View 4.x.
I spent some more time today meeting vendors and checking out 3rd party products. There are just way too many to go into but in short there are a lot of choices when it comes to managing your infrastructure and as proven by all the acquisitions VMware has made a lot of the innovation in monitoring and managing comes from these smaller companies.
Perhaps the coolest thing I saw was the magician Quest hired out. The guy did a few tricks that were ridiculous. I still can’t figure it out. I definitely encourage you to check that out if you have some time to kill.
I also met up with a few people at the VMware community lounge, some who are part of the VMware Design Group I started and manage through Linked in. Met another few people I hadn’t before. Additionally I somehow managed to run into 2 people from the RecoverPoint course I took a few months back in NJ and another from the VMware Design workshop I took back in January. Small World.
A session of note I attended today was the Architecture Design with Mike DiPetrillo. This is a group discussion format that I wasn’t aware of when I booked it and it turned out to be a very insightful experience and I learned a lot from others about their Cloud Journey’s. To be honest I’m not so sure I even though this had anything to do with the Cloud when I booked it but then again what doesn’t these days. After the experience in this one I’m definitely thinking of getting into more of these sessions in the days to come instead.
Design Considerations for the VMware VSA
Just a quick write-up on some things to consider when designing a solution involving VMware’s new Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA). I am personally very excited to see an offering of the like as many customers are currently using other VSA products or similar solutions to accomplish what they need. Not everyone needs a dedicated SAN, but that doesn’t mean they can’t take advantage of some of the great features of vSphere like DRS.
If looking at designing a solution using the VSA you will want to take a look at the version 1.0 release notes.There are a lot of important details in their that if you don’t pay attention to could bite you in the long run. For example, with version 1.0 disk capacity can not be changed after setup. I’ve listed some other critical points I found below.
Host Sizing
- 6 GB Memory minimum with 24 GB reccomended
- 4 NICs
- Minimum of 4 disks and maximum of 8 per host(internal disks only, no DAS)
- These disks must be configured in a RAID 1/0, so be prepared to lose half of your disk capacity as a tradeoff to local protection via RAID 1/0. Additionally you are going to be replicating this storage to another host in the cluster, so be careful to consider that overhead in terms of your overall capacity.
- vSphere 5 ONLY
And I’ll leave this with one last reminder, check the HCL. As with any of the components of your hardware and your storage, you are going to want to check the HCL here for supportability.
VMworld Experience Day 1 #VMworld
This is my first VMworld and it has definitely been an enjoyable experience so far.For those not in attendance I thought I ‘d share some quick thoughts daily.
Labs, Labs Labs
I focused the day on vCloud Director for labs as this is something I have not yet had a chance to fully delve into. Not having the infrastructure in place to just play with the feature set, it was great to run through a few labs on the topic. Pretty cool post on setting up vCloud for your home lab here.
One of the most exciting things I heard was that the VMworld Labs will be available to paid attendees after VMworld. Really great news as these labs are very detailed, and a review after the fact would be great. Not to mention there is never enough time in the day to do nearly half of everything at VMworld. Additionally there are a ton of labs to choose from and a ton of sessions, events, and everything else going on.
vSphere Clustering Q&A
Hosted by the authors of the vSphere 5 Technical Deep Dive was this session by Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman. This was the first session I attended and felt it was a great session. The Q&A format allowed a lot of questions that made me start thinking about a lot of different things I hadn’t before. For example, the mirror mode driver is something I definitely need to dive deeper into, and luckily this is also covered in their book. This is a feature that definitely has other potential use cases outside of storage vMotion.
Meeting People
Probably the coolest part of the day was seeing some familiar faces and meeting some new ones. I had two people I was planning on looking for during the week. One found me in the first session and I found the other one before lunch. Pretty crazy with the 20k plus people I heard were attending VMworld this year.
I also was able to spend some time in the VMware Community lounge and meet a lot of familiar avatars people that I could put a face to finally from the blog/twitter world.
Expecting the Unexpected : Assessing Risk in Your Design
Yesterday’s Earthquake just outside of Richmond, VA got me thinking about all the unexpected things that could happen. When talking specifically about designing a virtual infrastructure it is important to acknowledge risks, even if they are not something that can be mitigated immediately or ever.
When designing an assessment of Risk will bring about all the possible issues that could occur as result of your design, as well as some of the items that are not resolvable in a design. For example, when you virtualize your servers and consolidate them into one datacenter, you are now bringing everything into a single point that could be a point of failure. Your mitigate this risk by using HA, redundant hardware, networks, etc. You further this by having an offsite datacenter and use something like VMware Site Recovery Manager with EMC’s Recoverpoint to recover your virtual machines to any point in time in the event the primary datacenter goes down.
The example above of course is a very ideal situation, but not every company is able to have all these things either immediately or in some cases at all. Sometimes these reasons are financial and other times political, but regardless they are risks that need to be acknowledged. So let’s say we know today we don’t have the money for an offsite datacenter. We know the risk of not having another location to failover to and we identify it. Maybe we are able to convince upper management that in 6 months time we will have the budget to have a site we can at least restore to from offsite backups in the event of disaster. This may not seem ideal, but perhaps we are dealing with a company that has very little reliance on their servers and technology outside of email and collaboration, which is already provided as a managed service from elsewhere.
Another example of an unexpected event occurred here in Richmond a few years back. A huge wall protected part of the downtown area from flooding. The wall was tall enough that there was really little chance that water would ever go above the wall, and it didn’t. What did happen though was the wall trapped all the water in from part of a Hurricane storm and caused major damage to businesses in that area. No one would have ever thought a flood was possible.
Know what all your risks are, the costs and possibilities of them happening. By at least identifying these items you can put your best plan into place based on the resources you have. Share your thoughts on the above by posting a comment to this entry below.
#vMeetup VMware Design Study Group
Design Study Group Meetup at VMworld
Are you interested in meeting some of the members of this group in person at VMworld? I’ve scheduled a vMeetup for Tuesday 8/30 from 2:30-3:00 p.m. If you think you would be able to make it please reply here so I can get an idea of how many people may be attending.
We won’t get into any deep discussions as this is only a half hour slot, but it would be a great time to meet face to face with some of the others in the group and interested in learning more about designing VMware based virtual infrastructures. The meetup will take place at the VMworld Community Lounge
You can find full details of the vMeetups at http://www.vmworld.com/docs/DOC-5499
How do you protect vCenter?
vCenter is more and more becoming a critical piece to remain online at all time. By no means am I saying that it wasn’t always nice or a good idea to protect vCenter, but more and more products outside of vSphere or advanced features such as the distributed virtual switch and VMware View have a greater reliance on vCenter then just the hosts themselves. While the above mentioned will continue to run as is, any updates to networking or recomposition of desktops would not happen.
vCenter Heartbeat is a solution albeit a fairly costly one for smaller deployments that provides vCenter redundancy. I recently found out you can even deploy this across the WAN as long as you have a reasonable network connection and the system shares the same date/time zone settings. Additionally in the future release you will now have full protection for the View Composer database.
My question to everyone is what is your experience with vCenter Heartbeat ? I have not talked with many who have used the product so I’d also be curious to know what other methods you prefer to protect vCenter?
Another consideration is whether to virtualize vCenter or not. One of your design decisions here is do you want to place the management server on the set of hosts its managing? If you choose to do so you can take advantage of HA and DRS too keep the machine highly available in the event of host failures and smart placement to ensure resource, but what about in a situation where the whole environment goes down and vCenter can’t come back up? Again this may not be a decision driven strictly by technical requirements, but policy itself.
If you are interested in learning a bit more about heartbeat you can check out one of my previous posts for the VCAP-DCA study guide here.
To Wait or Not ? : The vSphere 5 Certification Debate
One of the hard parts of getting certifications is when it comes time to renew them. As a consultant I have quite a few now and it seems like something is always out of date or on its way out. In fact I recently passed two EMC certifications to only get notifications of updates required only a few weeks later.
When it comes to VMware certification I now have to consider not only what I need to renew, but how much further I want to go down the vSphere 4 track. It was recently announced that the last chance to defend for the VCDX 4 will be early next year, making me question whether it is worth taking the VCAP-DCD now, which I currently have scheduled.
What and How to Renew?
VCP
- For my VCP the upgrade track is fairly simple, take the VCP 5 exam before February 29, 2012
- After February 29th, take the what’s new course and then pass the exam.
- Also since I am a VCAP-DCA4, if I pass the VCAP-DCA5 that will renew the VCP.
VCAP-DCA
- It is my understanding that taking the VCAP-DCA5 will renew the VCAP-DCA4
How Much Further Should I Go Along the vSphere 4 Track?
As I have passed the VCAP-DCA4 and would eventually like to seek VCDX certification, I previously had booked the VCAP-DCD exam. At a cost of 400$, it is important to know for sure that this certification will provide a meaningful benefit.
My current concerns are if I take the exam and pass, what renewals will be necessary to present a VCDX submission and defense. Will I need to take both exams again, and at a cost of 400$?
There still has been no announcement on the availability of the VCAP-DCA and VCAP-DCD exams for version 5, and until then we will likely have to just wait and see what happens and hope for the best.
Share your concerns,questions, and answers on the next version of certification here.
