www.vExperienced.co.uk

What a week! My son was born on Sunday and on Friday night I finally received notification that I passed the VCAP5-DCA beta exam I sat back in May. Good things come to those that wait!

I really thought I’d failed as I didn’t even attempt four or five questions and I know I missed a few bits on the ones I did answer. It’s a great relief to have it out of the way however – with vSphere6 slated for a 2013 release it means I’ve got around two years grace before I have to consider upgrading again (assuming it takes a year for the exam to become available like last time!). It’s worth noting that 37% of the visitors to my blog (who responded to my poll on the right) don’t think the VCAP exams add any value over and above the VCP so maybe I’m just ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ for the sake of vanity!

Next up for me is VCAP5-DCD, VCP-IaaS, and VCP-DT, probably in that order. It’s like a cereal pack competition where you have to collect them all…

Back in March I received an email from VMware asking if I wanted to take part in the VCAP5-DCA beta exam. It was my first invite to a beta and having taken the VCAP4-DCA less than a year earlier I wasn’t sure I was prepared to commit the necessary time to study but I figured ‘what have I got to lose?’ and now I’m glad I accepted. There were delays getting the exams ready for prime time and I’ve spoken to people who took the VCAP4-DCA beta and had major issue with the environment so I went into the test with a slight sense of trepidation. My environment ran slow a few times and I had one glitch which caused me to go back and repeat a question or two but in general it worked very well. Congrats to the certification team for putting together a very solid and impressive exam!

Exam environment: There were a few tweaks to the exam environment (different background colours for putty sessions to help distinguish them, which I don’t remember from the first time round) but otherwise it’s much the same – RDP on a 1280 x 1024 screen, no task switcher, and various infrastructure details available at a glance for reference.I found it more effective to open a session once and then drag it to a corner out the way rather than close it. This saves confusion as without a task switcher you can’t retrieve a minimised window and also saves time logging back in. Maybe it’s because I’ve done it before and know what to expect but I actually enjoyed the experience whereas last time I found it very frustrating.

Time management: Time is still very challenging. The exam lasts 3.5 hours and there are 26 questions (there are also 26 objectives in the blueprint) which gives you just over 8 minutes per question. You can skip forwards and backwards through the questions so you can prioritise the ones you feel more confident about. Some questions have dependencies on earlier work but a bit of common sense will normally see you through. Do everything you can to save time. If you start a VM deploying don’t wait for it to complete, move onto the next question and come back later. You have a jotting pad in the exam so make notes on which questions to revisit.

Learning management: When was the last time you setup Autodeploy or resolved a performance issue in eight minutes, especially when you don’t know the infrastructure involved? Be realistic about how much the exam can cover but prepare to be surprised how well it tests your knowledge. As I mentioned above there are 26 questions and 26 objectives but it’s not that simple – one question could cover multiple objectives. Take AutoDeploy for example. It uses PowerCLI, ImageProfiles, Host Profiles and maybe some network troubleshooting. The blueprint covers a lot of material but you can narrow down what you study – if study time is tight prioritise the common tasks over the obscure ones (when was the last time you generated a database report from VUM?). Think about it from VMware’s perspective and bear in mind the exam infrastructure of two hosts and a vCenter server – there are quite a few ‘interaction’ points with third party technology (storage arrays, network switches etc) yet it’s a VMware focused test. For example with AutoDeploy it requires DHCP and PXE configured, yet these aren’t really VMware technology. Unless you use the vCSA of course….

The VCAP5-DCA exam is more focused on the ‘core’ vSphere platform, and is better for it. There’s only so much you can test in four hours and the slimmed down blueprint makes it more relevant to a mainstream audience – tools like vCenter Server Heartbeat and vCenter Orchestrator, which were included in the VCAP4-DCA exam, are only used by a small percentage of customers. Taking the exam was a great way of testing my knowledge of vSphere – it highlighted both my strengths and weaknesses and as a result I know where I need to spend some time improving my knowledge. My next challange? Bring on the VCAP5-DCD!

Patrick Kremer has also written up his thoughts on the beta – well worth a read, in particular the time management tips.

The VCAP5-DCA exam is a tough nut to crack and will probably consume quite a bit of your time in study and practice (unless you’re a VMware PSO in which case you probably do this stuff all day every day!). Before you get stuck into the blueprint objectives there are some things you should do to prepare;

• Get access to a lab. There are numerous options;
  • Build your own whitebox lab at home
  • Use spare equipment at your work.
  • Rent VCAP-DCA specific lab space on a weekly basis. There are a few of these popping up although I’ve not tried them myself – Optism Training, YourLabTime. You get enterprise grade equipment but at £120p/w upwards a home lab might be the more affordable option….
• Once you’ve got your lab, have a look at AutoLab by @demitassenz. It helps you quickly build a base lab.
• Download the official vSphere5 documentation (there’s a link at the bottom of the page to download a .ZIP of all docs combined). I’d recommend using the Xtravirt documentation downloader as it simplifies the process. Make sure you have the docs to hand as you’ll want to refer to them often.
• Gather additional study materials. This will depend on your budget but I’d recommend;
  • the Trainsignal training (there’s a VCAP4-DCA package and two vSphere5 packages)
  • Scott Lowe’s Mastering vSphere5 book
  • and of course my study guide! (my v4 guide is still 60% relevant)
• Plan your study time. There are 26 objectives so work out how much time you have until you want to sit the exam and work backwards. Be aware of your strengths – some sections you’ll cruise through while you may need to spend longer on the topics you’re less familiar with.
• Book the exam (through Pearson Vue). This may not work for everyone but many people work better with a deadline to adhere to. You can always move the booking provided you do so at least 24 hours before the day. Pick a date which gives you a suitable time to prepare.
• Get involved in social media – the VMTN community forums, Twitter, read and comment on blogs etc. As you’ll see from my study notes a good chunk of the material comes from these sources and having people to answer questions is one of the best ways to confirm your understanding.

Now dive into your studies and good luck!

As with all my VCAP5-DCA study notes, the blogposts only cover material new to vSphere5 so make sure you read the v4 study notes for section 1.1 first. When published the VCAP5-DCA study guide PDF will be a complete standalone reference.

Knowledge

• Identify RAID levels
• Identify supported HBA types
• Identify virtual disk format types

Skills and Abilities

• Determine use cases for and configure VMware DirectPath I/O
• Determine requirements for and configure NPIV
• Determine appropriate RAID level for various Virtual Machine workloads
• Apply VMware storage best practices
• Understand use cases for Raw Device Mapping
• Configure vCenter Server storage filters
• Understand and apply VMFS resignaturing
• Understand and apply LUN masking using PSA-related commands
• Analyze I/O workloads to determine storage performance requirements
• Identify and tag SSD devices
• Administer hardware acceleration for VAAI
• Configure and administer profile-based storage
• Prepare storage for maintenance (mounting/un-mounting)
• Upgrade VMware storage infrastructure

Tools & learning resources

• Product Documentation
  • vSphere Installation and Setup Guide
  • vSphere Storage Guide
  • vSphere Command-Line Interface Concepts and Examples
• vSphere Client / Web Client
• vSphere CLI
  • vscsiStats, esxcli, vifs, vmkfstools, esxtop/resxtop
• vSphere storage profiles on VMwareTV
• Good blogpost on NPIV (though nothing’s changed since v4)
• Chapter 6 of Scott Lowe’s Mastering VMware vSphere5 book
• VMworld sessions: VSP3868 – VMware vStorage Best Practices, VSP2774 – Supercharge your VMware deployment with VAAI
• Gregg Robertson’s study notes for 1.1

With vSphere5 having been described as a ‘storage release’ there is quite a lot of new material to cover in Section1 of the blueprint. First I’ll cover a couple of objectives which have only minor amendments from vSphere4.

Determine use cases for and configure VMware DirectPath I/O

The only real change is DirectPath vMotion, which is not as grand as it sounds. As you’ll recall from vSphere4 a VM using DirectPath can’t use vMotion or snapshots (or any feature which uses those such as DRS and many backup products) and the device in question isn’t available to other VMs. The only change with vSphere5 is that you can vMotion a VM provided it’s on Cisco’s UCS and there’s a supported Cisco UCS Virtual Machine Fabric Extender (VM-FEX) distributed switch. Read all about it here – if this is in the exam we’ve got no chance!

Identify and tag SSD devices

This is a tricky objective if you don’t own an SSD drive to experiment with (although you can workaround that limitation). You can identify an SSD disk in various ways;

1. Using the vSphere client. Any view which shows the storage devices (‘Datastores and Datastore clusters view’, Host summary, Host -> Configuration -> Storage etc) includes a new column ‘Drive Type’ which lists Non-SSD or SSD (for block devices) and Unknown for NFS datastores.
2. Using the CLI. Execute the following command and look for the ‘Is SSD:’ line for your specific device;

   esxcli storage core device list

Tagging an SSD should be automatic but there are situations where you may need to do it manually. This can only be done via the CLI and is explained in this VMware article. The steps are similar to masking a LUN or configuring a new PSP;

1. Check the existing claimrules
2. Configure a new claim rule for your device, specifying ‘ssd_enable’
3. Enable to new claim rule and load it into memory

So you’ve identified and tagged your SSD, but what can you do with it? SSDs can be used with the new Swap to Host cache feature best summed up by Duncan over at Yellow Bricks;

“Using “Swap to host cache” will severely reduce the performance impact of VMkernel swapping. It is recommended to use a local SSD drive to eliminate any network latency and to optimize for performance.”

As an interesting use case here’s a post describing how to use Swap to Host cache with an SSD and laptop – could be useful for a VCAP home lab!

The above and more are covered very well in chapter 15 of the vSphere5 Storage guide.

Read more…

IT is a fast moving industry, and the current shift to cloud computing is accelerating the rate of change. With the forthcoming release of the vSphere5 VCAP exams (VCAP5-DCA and the VCAP5-DCD) I’ve been planning to study my socks off to get both exams under my belt. I’m sure I’m not alone in struggling to make study time, particularly as my day job doesn’t tend to cover all of the material either because we’re only Enterprise level licensing or because we don’t use all the features. On top of that I’d like to update my VCAP-DCA study guide which will consume a significant chunk of time.

This serious case of study contention has made me revisit my priorities. The VMware ecosystem has evolved considerably over the last few years and there’s considerable buzz around VMware View and vCloud Director (not to mention the whole Cloud Foundry and vFabric ecosystem). Maybe these would be better areas to focus on? As John Troyer said about certifications “You don’t have to collect them all!” but it does make me wonder – which VMware certs are most likely to benefit career progression?

VCP or VCAP?

First some facts. The VMware platform which evolved into vSphere was launched in 2001, the first VCP exam was available in June 2003 (@susangude is VCP#1), and the first VCAP exams were launched seven years later in August 2010. Nine years on and the statistics are well known – around 60,000 VCPs worldwide and approximately 600 certified in each of the two VCAP tracks (so 50 VCPs for every VCAP!).

Read more…

Certification is a never ending treadmill of learning...

Along with others I received an email from VMware last week stating that the VCAP5-DCA exam was due to enter it’s beta testing in the next few weeks, along with the beta blueprint. As with any beta the contents are subject to change and the exam is NOT publically available yet – it’s currently scheduled for release this summer.

The contents of the beta are covered by an NDA so you won’t be hearing any other details from me but Randy Becraft, the senior Program Manager running the beta, has specifically allowed me to post these blueprint details to give candidates more time to prepare.

Before I cover what’s new it’s worth pointing out how much hasn’t changed;

• The bulk of the content (around 60%) is very similar to the VCAP4-DCA blueprint.
• You still need to be VCP5 certified as a prerequisite. The one exception is if you already hold the VCAP4-DCA certification you’re eligible to sit the VCAP5-DCA exam without first passing the VCP5 exam, provided you upgrade within three months of the exam’s release.
• The exam is still a live lab with a time limit of 225 mins (210 for the exam and 15 mins for a survey). There will be roughly 26 tasks to complete (which is less than the 36 for v4) but this can vary for each candidate.
• The exam is booked through Pearson-VUE professional centres.
• There will be a ten day wait for results (approximately)
  
• Will the exam environment include a task switcher or a higher resolution? We can but hope!

…and what’s no longer included (some significant chunks of learning);

• Orchestrator
• vCenter Heartbeat
• vShield Zones
• vCenter Server Linked Mode

There are two recommended courses for this exam;

• VMware vSphere – Fast Track
• VMware vSphere – Optimize and Scale [v5] – not yet available but due summer 2012

This is a change from the v4 DCA exam which listed four courses as ‘recommended’, including both the vSphere Manage for Performance and vSphere Troubleshooting neither of which are available yet for v5. The exam still includes troubleshooting and performance issues on the blueprint but maybe VMware felt that so many course recommendations for a single exam was too much.

It’s interesting to see that this new exam focuses on the core product – the biggest omissions are in the wider ecosystem and I wonder if they’ll reappear in some other, more specialised, certification (VCAP-Security etc). There may also have been practical considerations as the release cycle for these products isn’t aligned with the vSphere releases. This was apparent even with the VCAP-DCA4 release where the exam blueprint covered vShield Zones v1 even though v4 was released just before the exam went public (the Manage for Security course, which was recommended for VCAP-DCA, covered vShield Zones v4 so of limited use!).

VMware have also published extra guidance about the infrastructure you will be expected to work with during the exam, which will consist of two ESXi hosts and a vCenter server. This is similar to the v4 exam but you weren’t given this information in advance.

I’m running a poll on the value of the VCAP exams (to the right of this post) – I’d appreciate your feedback.

As with the VCAP4-DCA I’ll be publishing study notes as I work towards the exam. Watch this space!

Read more…

In last night’s VMware Community podcast John Hall, VMware’s lead technical certification developer gave some tidbits of information about the upcoming VCAP5 exams;

• There will be an expedited path for those with VCAP4 certifications BUT they will be similar to the VCP upgrade in that it’ll be a time limited offer. He didn’t specify exactly what form this would take but with the VCP upgrade you have roughly six months to take the new exam with no course prerequisites.  I’m guessing you’ll have a similar period where the VCP5 prerequisite doesn’t apply.

• While not committing to dates he did state that exams might be available at the upcoming partner exchange which starts on Feb 13th 2012. Even if those dates slip expect them soon!

With the upcoming Feb 29th deadline for the VCP5 exam you’d better get your study skates on. If you don’t take the VCP5 before the 29th and you’re not in a position to take the the new VCAP5 exams in the ‘discount’ period (however long that turns out to be) you might find yourself needing to sit a What’s New course and passing the VCP5 exam before you’re even eligible for the VCAP5 exams. Not a pleasant thought!

After several months of study (slightly longer than planned due to writing up all my study notes) I was finally notified that I’d passed the VCAP-DCA exam yesterday. Hurrah!

The VCAP-DCA blueprint is pretty comprehensive and for many will involve studying topics they’ve not used before. Regarding the exam itself I have nothing of value to add that hasn’t already been said, but it’s been nice to reflect on what I gained from taking the certification. Given that quite a few recruiters simply state ‘VCP/VCAP/VCDX’ as general requirements for job specs I’m not sure how much value the certification holds in the marketplace yet, but here are the top five ‘wins’ for me as a result of studying;

1. PowerCLI. I’ve scripted in many languages over the years but none that are so easy to pick up and achieve results with. I’ve used PowerCLI in production to automate deployments, get weekly reports and automate some compliance work and I doubt I’d have done so much if I didn’t have to cover the VCAP-DCA blueprint (especially the VIX component).
2. Distributed switches – my company don’t have Enterprise+ licencing so I don’t get to work with these in a production environment. Lab testing is never the same and the exam highlighted a few areas where I could improve. I like the concept, but with under a hundred hosts I’m not yet convinced of the value for money. Various features and products (vCD comes to mind) are dependant on vDS, so I think it’ll get pushed more and more by VMware however.
3. Host profiles – again, I had no real world experience due to licencing restrictions.I did learn that they’re not that great though, even in limited lab testing. There are too many things they can’d do, a fairly limited interface and lack of flexibility. Definitely not the equivalent of Group Policy in an AD environment (which was my mental equivalent).
4. ESXTOP. I’ve always been somewhat wary of this, especially after a presentation at the LonVMUG which was very good but hurt my brain! Despite being a Linux admin so comfortable with command line, something about the advanced ESXTOP settings seemed complex and hard to understand. After watching some VMworld sessions and working through the ESXTOP bible it’s now much clearer and I’ve found myself using it far more at work.
5. vCenter Heartbeat. Like many places we’re increasingly reliant on vCenter and I worry about resilience. I now  know how to use it – and the fact that I probably wouldn’t.

As with any exam though there are questions which you might not know the answer to, but you know a quick Google would tell you the answer (so have little real value in the exam, in my opinion). These aren’t quite in that category, but here’s three things which I had to learn purely for the sake of the exam;

1. Orchestrator. Much though I love automation this isn’t easy enough to use and the reliance on Javascript instead of PowerCLI is a deal breaker for me. I can write Javascript (or use Onyx) but for an admin this is hard to use compared to PowerCLI.
2. Fault Tolerance. Due to the 1vCPU restriction I’ve not got any servers which really benefit from this, so it was an exercise (if interesting) in theory only.
3. vShield Zones. I’d actually hoped this might be in my top five, but in the end it’s in my bottom three. The interface is incredibly basic compared to any dedicated firewall so I wouldn’t want to use it in production. The exam also only covers v1.0, whereas v4.0 is the current release.

I used a wide variety of study materials, and in order of most beneficial here’s how I’d list them;

• Blogs – these complement the official docs – it’s where people spot the real challenge of a particular feature, or the unspoken gaps not mentioned in the official docs. Start at vLaunchPad.
• Official documentation
• VMworld sessions – free to view (mostly) and focused on particular subjects, these an are often overlooked treasure trove.
• Study notes – creating my own study notes definately helped me remember things, as did other people’s (Sean Crookston’s especially).
• Community forums – both the general vSphere ones and the VCAP-DCA forum are useful places to post questions, and see what everyone else is asking. vicfg-firewall anyone?
• Trainsignal’s Troubleshooting training course by David Davis. The information is very useful and goes above and beyond the blueprint requirements.

And of course I have something to add to the C.V.!

This is a quick post to say that over the last few days I’ve been busily posting the last few objectives for the VCAP-DCA exam, and after quite a few months I’m finally done! You can download a PDF of the completed notes or refer to the VCAP-DCA index page for the online versions.

Enjoy!

Host Profiles are a new feature to vSphere 4 but are only available to Enterprise+ licencees. As my company haven’t yet found a need for Enterprise+ features I’d not really worked with them before so this section was new to me. Interestingly the main reference given in the blueprint is the Datacenter Administration Guide which has very little about host profiles. The ESX/ESXi configuration guides have a small section on host profiles but not much, so the best reference is probably the VMware Host Profiles – Technical Overview whitepaper.

Skills and Abilities

• Use Profile Editor to edit and/or disable policies
• Create sub‐profiles
• Use Host Profiles to deploy vDS

Tools & learning resources

• Product Documentation
  • vSphere Datacenter Administration Guide
  • VMware vSphere™ 4: Deployment Methods for the VMware® vNetwork Distributed Switch
  • VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch migration and configuration
• vSphere Client
• Technical Deep Dive – Host Profiles (VM3433, VMworld ’09)
• VMware Management blog article on host profiles

Host Profiles (VCP revision)

Basically host profiles are the equivalent of Microsoft’s Group Policy, but for VMware hosts.

• Two primary uses
  • Ease deployment challenges (faster, more consistent)
  • Ongoing configuration control and audit reporting
• Policy options (determining how a configuration setting is applied)
  • Use a fixed configuration
  • Ask the user how to configure it
  • Use an intelligent policy (using one or multiple criterion)
  • Disregard a setting
• Works in a similar fashion to Update Manager;

1. Create a baseline from a reference host.
2. Attach the host profile to the hosts or clusters you want to configure
3. Remediate (configure) the hosts or clusters
4. Review compliance status

• Unlike VUM it can’t remediate all the hosts in a cluster automatically (it won’t put them into maintenance mode for you etc). You can attach a profile to the cluster but you have to apply to each host manually (this is largely because the host profile may require user input).
• Can only be used on vSphere hosts (not VI 3.x)
• Must be created using a reference host, or imported from a previously created host profile.
• Can be exported (in VMware Profile Format, *.vcf, which is XML content).  Host Profiles are not shared using vCentre Linked Mode, you have to export/import to other vCentre instances.
  NOTE: Administrator passwords aren’t exported as a security measure.
• An ESX reference host can be applied to either ESX or ESXi. An ESXi reference host can ONLY be applied to another ESXi host.
• When updating a host using a host profile you have to manually put the host in maintenance mode first. This is a significant issue for some people (although if you’re licenced for host profiles you’ve also got licences for vMotion and DRS so moving VMs off the host is potentially easier). Note that you need to enter maintenance mode even for trivial settings such as setting the time, timezone etc. Any setting which normally requires a reboot (changing service console memory for example) will still need a reboot.
• You must have both host profile privileges (create, delete, edit etc) AND privileges to configure the area in question (Networking, Storage etc) for the operation to be allowed.

REAL WORLD: When building a new ESX/ESXi host it will have a 60 day eval period with all features enabled so even if you don’t have Enterprise+ licencing you can use host profiles for initial configuration.

Read more…