VMware Certification & General Advice Thread

[ChrisD.]

I've been meaning to do this for a while. For those who don't know, I work for VMware in the Professional Services Organisation as a Senior Consultant. I specialise in the SDDC suite of our products, mainly around VCF, HCI, vSAN, NSX etc. It involves the design and delivery as well as health checks for our customers.

I've amassed quite a few certs, VCIX DCV (both VCAPs) and a couple of VCPs (DCV and NV). I'm currently studying towards VCAP in NV and once the current COVID-19 situation is over I'll most likely be pursuing VCDX however I'm not sure in which track yet.

I thought I'd start this thread if anyone here, professional or otherwise, has any specific VMware questions, wants guidance on exam paths, our products and what not. Or if anyone is interested in joining VMware I can share how I feel about them as an employee (spoiler - very good!).

I do have a blog which you can check out here. I've just added a new homelab post and I'm working on an NSX-T 3.0 one at the moment.

So, anyone else certified? Or even any other employees? Please feel to share any questions you have.

 

[ChrisD.]

It's been at least a few months since I had my last look at the vmware certification paths but the main thing that has always put me off is the requirement to pay £3k+ for a course run by an approved provider. Now I appreciate that there's an argument that this is a good way of protecting the value of the certification, but the other big players don't feel the need to do it, so why does vmware? Maybe this has changed, and if so, good, colour me interested!

You used to be able to get VCP6-NV if you help CCNA or higher, although looking this morning that path has now been removed. If you speak to various providers you should be able to get a hefty discount, I think I paid around £1.5k when I did mine through Global Knowledge. It's paid dividends for me.

 

[ChrisD.]

Can I just say, VCF as a product, what a load of absolute buggy junk haha. Can't even update to the newer version because it's greenfield only.

You mean 4.0? Yeah there is no upgrade path at the moment frustratingly but I am led to believe it's in the works.

The issue causing it most likely is that NSX-V cannot run on vSphere 7 so it's working out a V to T migration path without a huge outage.

What about it do you find buggy? The deployment process or once it's deployed?

 

[ChrisD.]

@Vince

 

[ChrisD.]

This is clearly the right place So tell me... Is Horizons worth it and how does it fit alongside my estate? i'm on essentials plus two seperate licenses for two geographical locations with veeam, you know the rest of the setup

What do you want to use it for? It's a large product suite. I've only ever set up desktop pools on it and it's worked extremely well and intuitive in the new HTML5 UI.

 

[ChrisD.]

As I said in the other thread, I'm not much of an EUC guy, but what has been posted covers it well. Also don't forget that the cooler features require a more expensive license. HOL is a good place to look, you can also run a trial period now on most of our products. Have a look here: https://my.vmware.com/en/web/vmware/evalcenter?p=horizon-7

 

[ChrisD.]

By the way, I've been doing a lot of HCX and VMC on AWS recently, so if anyone has any queries then please let me know.

 

[ChrisD.]

Slightly unrelated, but vSphere GSS are absolutely garbage lately... Raised an issue that we can't seem to get people on, then they downgrade from a p1 to a p2 to a p3, request uplift and manager assistance gets ignored, can't get through to the live queue as you can only raise p1s through the portal during COVID. Missed their SLAs by over 18 hours at this point and one of our biggest clients is an NHS trust which is having major performance impact. #Rant

Sorry to hear about your experience. Can you send me the SR number and I’ll have a look at the case. Also do you have a TAM? As if you have, I would raise the issue with them also.

 

[ChrisD.]

What build are you on?

 

[ChrisD.]

Can you point me in the right direction for hypervisors, please?

Who are the end clients going to be? If small business then look into vSphere Essentials.

 

[ChrisD.]

@Throrik can you PM or trust me the SR if you don't mind? I wouldn't mind taking a look and it's a quiet day.

 

[ChrisD.]

Sent you a PM, didn't realise they'd been enabled on the forum now haha.

Just had a look, looks like the assigned engineer is going to try and reproduce this, you could ask for it to be escalated to engineering to have a look.

The memory graph does look very odd!

Under advanced settings on an affected host has the line sched.mem.maxmemctl been added?

 

[ChrisD.]

Don't forget that not all APIs are exposed, it depends entirely on the license that the ESXi host has. For example, backup APIs are not exposed on the free license.

 

[ChrisD.]

The exams all cost the same at VCP level, the main issue most have is that the course is mandatory and can cost several grand to complete.

 

[ChrisD.]

I took the opportunity last night to sit VCAP DCV Deploy 2022, I passed which renewed my VCIX to 2022.

It was interesting doing it from home, the larger screen real estate definitely helped with the lab compared to those at the test centres. However it being a ~3h30 exam and not being able to go for a pee made me wish I was in a test centre so you can at least go to the toilet. I also find that going to the toilet at a test centre really helps in terms of getting away from the screen for a few minutes, something you might have blanked on before comes back to you.

 

[ChrisD.]

Last week I sat and passed VCAP Network Virtualization Deploy, head down for the design exam as I'd like to be double VCIX by the end of the year.