If you work your way through the vCSHB Reference Guide you’ll have covered every objective in the VCAP-DCA blueprint, so that’s where I’d recommend you start. If you have time, view the VMworld sessions for a bit of background and reinforcement. I went into a bit more detail on this objective as it’s something I wanted to evaluate for my company, so there’s some ‘real world’ issues covered which I doubt you’ll need for the exam.
Knowledge
- Identify the five protection levels for vCenter Server Heartbeat
- Identify the three server protection options for vCenter Server Heartbeat
- Identify supported cloning options
Skills and Abilities
- Install and configure vCenter Server Heartbeat
- Determine use cases for and execute a manual switchover
- Recover from a failover
- Monitor vCenter Server Heartbeat and communication status
- Configure heartbeat settings
- Configure shutdown options
- Configure application protection
- Add/Edit Services
- Add/Edit Tasks
- Edit/Test Rules
- Install/Edit Plug?ins
- Add/Remove Inclusion/Exclusion Filters
- Perform Full System and Full Registry checks
- Configure/Test Alerts
- Troubleshoot common vCenter Server Heartbeat error conditions
Tools & learning resources
- Product Documentation
- vSphere Client – not sure why this is listed as vCSHB isn’t integrated into the VI client….
- Protecting vCenter with vCentre Heartbeat (TA15, VMworld ’09. Covers V5.5, not v6.3)
- VMware vCentre Heartbeat Best Practices (VM2674, VMworld ’09. Covers V5.5, not v6.3)
- Mike Laverick’s four part series at TechTarget
- Paul Richard’s blog entry on testing vCSHB
- Julian Wood on why vCSHB isn’t an ideal solution (about half way down the post).
- VMware’s community forums for vCSHB
- VMware KB articles
- vCSHB prerequisites (VMware KB1017587)
- VMworld 2010 lab 10 – vCSHB setup and configuration (requires valid login)