VCP6-DCV?

Lanz

Lanz

Lanz

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Hi

I did VCP4 yonks ago and have recently completed a qualifying 6.0 course. I notice you now have to take a Foundation exam first and then the VCP yet I only got a single exam voucher, I guess this means I'll need to fork out for the 2nd exam?

So has anyone recently completed the 6.0 cert, how was it compared to v4/5?

Cheers
 
Evil in a word. I'd say VCP4 is easy, 5 pretty big jump in hardness, 6 evil.

Before they asked you lots of questions related to minimums and maximums and differences in the VMware Product Portfolio - that's all gone now and they've made it a massively harder test.



M.
 
How is it harder if you do not need to remember those dam maximums. I did my vcap as well as vcp4. Really enjoyed the vcap
 
I've also heard that the VCP6-DCV is a step up from the previous exams, I know several people that have taken it.

Having done the VCP5, VCP5.5D and the VCAP5-DCD, I'm looking to do the VCAP6-DCA (whatever they decide to call it), to upgrade to the VCIX6-DCV - skipping out the VCP6-DCV, hopefully its released in the next month or so according to news a couple of days ago.

Check out the google study groups, great bunch of people on there, links to all the resources that you should need.

https://plus.google.com/communities/106892749841421577090
 
It's easy to remember minimums and maximums especially as there isn't a ton of them. I reckon in the VCP4 exam I had around 10-15 questions on either minimums and maximums or other products in the VMware family.

It's now, massively, harder because it goes into areas which most people probably won't have used much and into vast detail, such as VSAN. There's areas like when services are running, upgrading to v6, vNUMA, VCVA appliance, etc. and you still have the more usual questions chucked in as well.

It's not something to be taken lightly and you will need to study a mass of topics.



M.
 
I'm actually better with real life type questions that I've worked on in the past, rather than memory exercises. VSan and vvol questions could be tricky though as people don't really use them in the wild so much.
 
I sat the Delta exam last month and out of all the VMware exams I have sat this was the hardest (VCP4, 5, 5 Cloud and NV).

I went through the ICM course (I didn't have to as a valid VCP but it was still a good thing to do) as well as using the PluralSight videos (at the time it was short two of them from the 11 in the series) and with the inclusion of so many different technologies now it's not as easy as the VCP4 / 5 was.

VSAN played a large part in my exam as well as upgrading from 5.5 - 6. I was never tested on SSO so PSC also played a big part in the exam.

There are a couple of study guides out there (at least one sponsored by Veeam) as well as the vBrownBag podcasts on the subject matter that you should have a look at.

I would say that the final 3 weeks of study I probably put in 3 hours a day of playing \ videos \ reading, that's on top of the ICM course, the home lab I have and previous VCP experience.
 
Passed the foundations exam today, but I found it much harder than I expected.

Of the 65 questions, I would say 40 of them were on the more electic stuff like VSAN, vRealise and Fault Tolerance - things most people won't use day to day.

There were very few questions related to the setup and administration of ESXi and vCenter. There were only a couple of questions on networking and non-VSAN storage.

I'm going to do a lot more work before attempting the DCV exam. I can only expense exams which I pass!
 
blueboy2001 said:
Passed the foundations exam today, but I found it much harder than I expected.

Of the 65 questions, I would say 40 of them were on the more electic stuff like VSAN, vRealise and Fault Tolerance - things most people won't use day to day.

There were very few questions related to the setup and administration of ESXi and vCenter. There were only a couple of questions on networking and non-VSAN storage.

I'm going to do a lot more work before attempting the DCV exam. I can only expense exams which I pass!
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It sort of makes sense though I suppose. VMware is going to find a niche with applications that are badly designed to the point where they need Fault Tolerance to stay running, hence why the certs are nudging people in that direction. They're also obsessed with the whole EVO:RAIL thing (and weirdly scared of Nutanix) which I guess is where vSAN comes from. The rest of the world is busy redesigning things to run on the Wild West of public cloud infrastructure where nothing is guaranteed. Financial applications and the world of healthcare are unlikely to do this as they are burdened with regulations that don't make much sense or are interpreted wrong, and really awful software that barely works yet is also incredibly important.

I did look into the whole VCP thing about a year ago but I was of the opinion that I'm a bit late to the party - I'm not consulting for financials, and I saw it as a bit more valuable to learn automation/orchestration on public cloud platforms due to the larger potential employment options coming from that.

Be interested to hear what the VCP guys in this thread are doing with it.
 
You'd be surprised at the amount of companies out there that want a VCP. VMware is pretty much in every mid sized upwards company to a degree and if you have all of your production servers on it then you want the best people to deal with it.

There are a lot of VCPs who deal with the cloud but usually these people are dealing with vCloud rather than VMware which is a massively different product and also requires a different skill set. There are some similarities in the backend but normally, these people, would go down a different certification route or have a VCP and then move to something else.

Besides being late to the party is one thing not being invited is another.



M.
 
I think I was probably overstating how quickly I expected VMware to disappear - I think we're good for the majority of the coming decade, for example. I do think Hyper-V is going to eat into market share at the smaller deployment end of the market depending on what the Server 2016 licensing shakeup achieves, and people wanting to build a private cloud will be doing it with open source products. It's definitely got momentum, but the company has had so many false starts with vCloud that I can't see that part surviving long term.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's a good product, but I think that the type of thought process that challenges that VMware (well, vSphere) suited peaked between 2005 and 2015.
 
Caged said:
VMware is going to find a niche with applications that are badly designed to the point where they need Fault Tolerance to stay running, hence why the certs are nudging people in that direction.
Click to expand...

I don't see how FT helps with misbehaving applications. It just gives you 2 crashed applications a few milliseconds apart.

Pre VSphere 6 the limitations on FT made it largely unusable, I suppose now it can do multiple CPU's, actually has some storage redundancy, and you can snapshot FT VM's in order to back them up the use cases have expanded and they want certified people to be aware of it.

Our customers are largely SME's with 50-250 users and public sector organisations up to 1000 users. They're mostly still buying VMWare. The only sectors where Hyper-V is gaining any traction is in schools because their needs are simple and MS give it to them for next to nothing, and businesses with a couple of servers left who have gone to Office 365, and we have started using it for RDS servers because a DL360 Gen9 with 2 CPU's, 96Gb RAM, 100Gb SSD for SmartCache and 4x 300Gb disks gives a nice fast 3 node RDS farm in a box for not mega money with a single RoK licence.
 
I meant more in terms of the only provision for a failover being added at the hypervisor level, which isn't a particularly sane way of doing application availability, and like you say it only protects against issues on the host. FT is an expensive way of getting hardware stability when really people need to look at the applications running on the platform and see if there isn't a more sane way to architect them. The best example I can think of is the changes that Exchange went through from 2003 to where it is now - the role of fast disk was massively de-emphasized as the single instance storage element was removed and the deployment method essentially turned into "just deploy lots of instances on very average hardware, the software will sort out the availability".

Compare this to what Kerio (remember them?) are doing with their recently launched 'Cloud' offering, which is just the normal Kerio Connect service - a single server that does everything relating to email - with the availability all provided by VMware. Not only does this leave them unable to quickly scale using a third party cloud provider, but the licensing costs must be killing them. I can only assume it's a short-term thing to stop the hemorrhaging of customers over to the obvious choices for hosted email provision while they furiously try to re-engineer the product in the background.

Obviously I am aware these applications aren't disappearing overnight, but I'm surprised that you still see a lot of VMware going into the 50-employee SME as everyone we deal with at that sort of size wants to turn their capital hardware cycles into opex with the usual suspects of public cloud providers. Do you deal with regulated industries, is it more of a momentum thing, or are the servers all pets?
 
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In my experience (working as a service provider for 10+ years) FT has only really been seen as a work around for "legacy" OS/Application stacks whereby there's no application or OS high availability options and where a host crash causing a dirty OS shut-down would cause more problems than good where older OSes wouldn't handle that event at all well leading to a prolong re-start on an alternative host (force check disks and a the like).

It's one of those brilliant sounding technologies but always seems to fail short of the mark, or there's generally better ways to go.
 
FT is such an unbelievably niche feature, that it annoys me that VMware are even asking more than 2 questions on it in the exam.

FT is for ancient Tier 1 legacy apps that can't be re-engineered and have to keep running. FT only protects against faulty hardware, and only grants you the 1-2 minutes it would take HA to reboot the VM anyway. Given the (until very recently) significant limitations on number of CPUs, I even question how useful it would be in practice. This is the sort of app that would be running on a giant Sun box that cost £200k 10+ years ago. Again, VMware can't run Solaris apps, so what is the market for FT?

If it's a recent app, then if it is Tier 1 it will have proper clustering or built-in HA; and if it doesn't, then someone needs to be sacked.

I feel FT exists purely for marketing purposes.
 
And to return to the original topic, with new releases of vSphere every 12-18 months, I find it extremely difficult to justify the expense and massive effort required to stay up to date with VCP. I think if you are reasonably junior then it will help get your foot in the door, but once you have a decent job or two under your belt, where you are demonstrating what you actually do on a day-to-day basis with VMware products, then the certification becomes less useful.

At least Microsoft waits 4-5 years between releases.
 
rotor said:
And to return to the original topic, with new releases of vSphere every 12-18 months, I find it extremely difficult to justify the expense and massive effort required to stay up to date with VCP. I think if you are reasonably junior then it will help get your foot in the door, but once you have a decent job or two under your belt, where you are demonstrating what you actually do on a day-to-day basis with VMware products, then the certification becomes less useful.

At least Microsoft waits 4-5 years between releases.
Click to expand...

Try telling that to all the VCDX's out there...
 
A VCDX is a completely different type of qualification to a VCP so I don't see how it's impossible for one to be considered poor value and the other to be a license to print money.
 
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