VMware Certified Advanced Professional - Data Center Virtualization Design
Having passed the VCAP5-DCD exam with little to no studying only eighteen months ago and VCIX6-NV since. All things considered I was pretty confident of doing well in the VCAP6-DCV Design exam, and when I completed exam I was pretty sure I’d passed. To my surprise I failed the exam with a 285, to make matters worse during the drive home I couldn’t fathom in my mind where it had gone wrong. Luckily on readin the score report it highlights the blueprint objectives relating the area’s of weakness. For me that was,
- Objective 1.2 - Gather and Analyze Application Requirements
- Objective 1.3 - Determine risks, requirements, constraints and assumptions
- Objective 3.4 - Determine Appropriate Compute Resources for a vSphere 6.x Physical Design
Here I focus on these three objectives, and how I revisited my study and revision to fill my knowledge gap.
Objective 1.2 - Gather and Analyze Application Requirements
Blueprint Defined Skills and Abilities
- Gather and analyze application requirements for a given scenario.
- Determine the requirements for a set of applications that will be included in the design.
- Collect information needed in order to identify application dependencies.
- Given one or more application requirements, determine the impact of the requirements on the design.
Resources I used
vBrownBag VCAP6-DCV Design Objective 1.2 with Mark Gabryjelski
Objective 1.3 - Determine risks, requirements, constraints and assumptions
Blueprint Defined Skills and Abilities
- Differentiate between the concepts of risks, requirements, constraints, and assumptions.
- Given a statement, determine whether it is a risk, requirement, constraint, or an assumption.
- Analyze impact of VMware best practices to identified risks, constraints, and assumptions.
Resources I used
vBrownBag VCAP6-DCV Design Objective 1.3 with Rebecca Fitzhugh
Objective 3.4 - Determine Appropriate Compute Resources for a vSphere 6.x Physical Design
Blueprint Defined Skills and Abilities
- Analyze best practices with respect to CPU family choices.
- Evaluate NUMA and vNUMA with ESXi hosts and Virtual machines in a given design.
- Analyze the following in a vSphere design:
- Enhanced vMotion compatibility
- Implications of vSMP in virtual machines
- Transparent Page Sharing (TPS) and large pages
- Resource overcommitment
- Based on the service catalog and given functional requirements:
- Determine the most appropriate compute technologies for the design
- Implement the service based on the required infrastructure qualities.
- Determine the impact of a technical design on the choice of server density:
- Scale Up/Out
- Auto Deploy
- Calculate the required number of nodes in an HA cluster based upon host failures and resource guarantees
- Evaluate the implications of using reservations, limits, and shares on the physical design.
- Specify the resource pool and vApp configuration based upon resource requirements.
- Size the following resources appropriately:
- Memory
- CPU
- I/O devices
- Internal storage
- Given a constraint to use existing hardware, determine suitability of the hardware for the design.
Resources I used
RAID
vSphere Flash Read Cache aka vFlash
vSphere Flash Read Cache aka vFlash - FAQs
VMware Infrastructure Architecitecture Overview