VCAP6-DCV Design – Study Notes

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I’ve been mostly a systems administrator for the last 10 years or so, and my (brief) experience with infrastructure consulting and design is far away in time. While it is true that, before that, my day to day job dealt with software consulting, customer’s requirements gathering and (mostly) programming, design requires a different skill set than the one I am now used to.

So now, after having some months ago passed VCAP5-DCA, I’m now in the mood for a challenge and I’m going for the design part of VMware’s datacenter certification portfolio: let’s do VCAP6-DCV Design!

From now on, I will be publishing here my study notes and links to resources, mostly for my own use but you are welcome to use them. Please take into account: this is a work in progress, and I will probably be editing some of the pages in a daily basis.

The Blueprint

I will be following VMware’s official blueprint.

  • Section 1 – Create a vSphere Conceptual Design
    • Objective 1.1 – Gather and analyze business requirements
    • Objective 1.2 – Gather and analyze application requirements
    • Objective 1.3 – Determine Risks, Requirements, Constraints, and Assumptions
  • Section 2 – Create a vSphere 6.x Logical Design from an Existing Conceptual Design
    • Objective 2.1 – Map Business Requirements to a vSphere 6.x Logical Design
    • Objective 2.2 – Map Service Dependencies
    • Objective 2.3 – Build Availability Requirements into a vSphere 6.x Logical Design
    • Objective 2.4 – Build Manageability Requirements into a vSphere 6.x Logical Design
    • Objective 2.5 – Build Performance Requirements into a vSphere 6.x Logical Design
    • Objective 2.6 – Build Recoverability Requirements into a vSphere 6.x Logical Design
    • Objective 2.7 – Build Security Requirements into a vSphere 6.x Logical Design
  • Section 3 – Create a vSphere 6.x Physical Design from an Existing Logical Design
    • Objective 3.1 – Transition from a Logical Design to a vSphere 6.x Physical Design
    • Objective 3.2 – Create a vSphere 6.x Physical Network Design from an Existing Logical Design
    • Objective 3.3 – Create a vSphere 6.x Physical Storage Design from an Existing Logical Design
    • Objective 3.4 – Determine Appropriate Compute Resources for a vSphere 6.x Physical Design
    • Objective 3.5 – Determine Virtual Machine Configuration for a vSphere 6.x Physical Design
    • Objective 3.6 – Determine Data Center Management Options for a vSphere 6.x Physical Design

Resources

This exam has been available for just 4 months or so and while, as of yet, there’s not much specific content available in the internet or elsewhere, you can still find some guides and books for VCAP5-DCD. The thing with this exam is, at least in my opinion, that is not so much about the technology but about the methodology. This means that most of the resources used for preparation of previous versions of the exam are still relevant for version 6. As Paul McSharry puts it,

As VMware develops more exciting functionality, the blueprint will also change with respect to technology, but the overall theme of and feeling behind this certification should not. After all, platform design processes and thoughts do not change, the technologies do.

In each objective I will be including links to relevant posts or documents but, generally speaking, these are some of the resources I intend to use as I make my way into the exam preparation: