VCAP-DCA Exam Experience

Anyone who has studied for a VMware VCAP certification knows just how expensive they are (even when you’re not paying for it, you still have to get your employer’s approval!), so seeing as I had a VCAP discount code to be used by the end of October and sit the exam by the end of the year, I decided to have a half priced pop at the VCAP-DCA.

I’m lucky enough to already have two VCAPs (DTD and DCD) so I kind of know what to expect, but this was my first VCAP administrator exam, so in that respective, it was a new experience for me. So as I’ve said before and as many others have before me, time is of the essence in these exams. I have to travel to Leeds to sit VCAP exams as there are no longer any test centres in the North West of England that now do these exams. Bit of a pain, but it means that I can take the train to Leeds in the same time it would take for me to drive there, meaning I can do some last minute cramming before I go in there, in case there is any area I consider myself particularly weak at.

I like to arrive in plenty of time for these things, so I got there an hour early and took myself off for a coffee and some food. As the exam appointment spanned lunchtime, I did not want to start feeling hungry half way through, and as for coffee, well you find me a good techie who can’t survive without it!

After the standard checkin process of ID and photographs, I got sat down to do the exam. There’s the usual survey before you start. I know they always say it has no bearing on your exam, but I’m paranoid. I always tick the box that says “I don’t even know what a virtual switch is” on the off chance I’ll get an easier set of questions!

So the exam started. Nothing new to say here, 26 questions in 3.5 hours. So far, so blueprint. As usual with VCAP exams, watch the time like a hawk. I worked out later is something like 9 minutes per question. I’m sorry VMware, but even if you really know your stuff, that’s still not enough time. After one hour I’d done only 8 questions! This promotes speed over accuracy and also really dissuades you from checking your responses, in my opinion. It’s meant to mimic real life and in many ways it does, but the time constraint I think is weighted too far one way. Either a couple of questions fewer or a little more time, either way would be good.

Anyway, the exam itself was a broad mix of skills tested across a variety of areas – storage, networking, cluster configuration, VM configuration. I know I’m being deliberately vague but I don’t want to break NDA. Again some sage advice with VCAP exams is to do as much as you possibly can. Even if you don’t do all of the question “right”, you should still get credit for the bits you do. And also remember there are usually more than one way to skin a particular cat. So for something you’re asked to do, remember you can probably do it through the VI client, PowerCLI or even host command line/vMA. Doesn’t matter how you get there, just matters about the end result.

Another common comment – read the question! Sounds a bit stupid I know, but there were a couple of questions where some added detail that seems a little insignificant makes a big difference to how you complete the task. Some questions have several subtasks, so again, make sure you do what you can and pick up marks along the way.

I read some comments in advance about latency between screens taking too much time. I have to say I didn’t really experience that, the whole thing was perfectly usable and being able to flick backwards and forwards between the questions helped when I was waiting for a task to finish. If you’re asked to run something that might take a minute or two, go to the next question and make a start or drop back and go over something you might have passed on. One comment here, and let me phrase this as generally as possible so as not to break NDA – VMware, please don’t ask candidates to make changes to VMs that detrimentally affect the operation of future tasks. I’ll leave it at that, hopefully anyone who knows which question I’m referring to will know what I mean. This cost me a few minutes and to be honest, pissed me off a little bit.

Other than that, it was a highly enjoyable exam and very challenging. Have I passed? Ask me again in “up to 15 business days”. My gut feeling leaving the test centre was that I’d done just about enough to get through, but you never know. I missed two questions completely because the first one was a topic I’m useless at because it’s a feature I’ve never used and the second because I was literally out of time. Two things I got stuck on I remembered almost instantly I left the test centre, once the pressure was off! Bugger!

I think you need 300/500 to pass, I’d like to think I’ve just about done that, but let’s see. If I have to resit, I’m confident I’d pass it second time around. Totally different than the design VCAP exams, but fun none the less and an exam you can’t wing your way through.

Tips? Advice?

• TrainSignal’s VCAP-DCA course with Jason Nash, excellent as usual
• ValcoLabs Study Guide – I had a quick flick through this and it’s pretty good as a source of reference or a quick skim before you go in
• My good friend and ex-colleague Gregg Robertson recommends doing each item on the blueprint 5 times in your lab to reinforce the methods of completion. I think that’s not a bad shout, although I didn’t do this. No time as usual!
• Watch the time, yeah I know it’s standard for VCAP exams
• Complete what bits you can, don’t freak out if they ask you something you’re weak on, we can’t know everything
• Read the question! Obvious again, but in a couple of cases for me it affected how a feature was configured
• Breathe!

So we’ll see if I passed or not. I’m not going to get hung up about it if I haven’t. Then what? I don’t know right now. I see the VCAP-DTA has just been released, so I might have a go at that if another discount exam voucher code does the rounds early next year. As for VCDX, well let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I want to see if I’ve passed the DCA first!

Thanks for stopping by, hope this was useful if you’re considering sitting this exam. Do it, it’s a great challenge.

On the move again…

Well Wednesday was my last working day at Xtravirt and I’m preparing to move on to yet another employer (saying that, I’ve not had so many in my career that I’ve lost count!). From 3rd September, I’ll be working at the Marsh and McLennan group in Liverpool, doing various VMware related activities.

As always at times like this, I find myself going to great pains to say that there were no ulterior motives for me leaving Xtravirt. They’re a great bunch and very skilled, so I would without hesitation say that if you ever get chance to work with or for them, take it, you won’t regret it.

For my part, I’d bitten off a little more than I could chew from a lifestyle point of view. I’ve had fun travelling the UK and further afield over the last couple of years, but I realised that I wanted my own bed back and to spend more time at home now my kids are a little older and somewhat more “challenging”. Getting an opportunity in Liverpool is perfect, far enough away but close enough to home that I can commute and see more of one of our finest cities close up. I’m embarrassed to say I’ve been to Liverpool less than half a dozen times in my life.

It also occurred to me after the interview that I could do without that level of stress for a while, so I certainly don’t plan on making any further moves for quite a while. It’s about time I got to own something over a period of time. Consulting is great fun and really takes you out of your comfort zone, but in the end, you walk off into the sunset never knowing how “your baby” turned out. Hopefully that won’t be the case at MMC, I’ll see things start from an idea and go through to design, procurement, delivery and a full life cycle after.

Can’t say I’ll miss motorway service stations too much, but I’ve learned in this life to never say never. There’s a good chance I’ll be back out on the road sometime in the future, but not for now.

 

I’ve been in new new role with Xtravirt now so seven weeks or so now, and it’s interesting at this point to take a quick checkpoint and look at what I’ve observed already. I’ve been in the End User Computing game for some 14 of the 16 years I’ve been in the IT industry, in fact, it wasn’t even called EUC back then. I think the euphemism was something like “bloody end users!”, but of course we live in enlightened times these days, and we have to give them a more businesslike moniker.

The point is that EUC now is primarily a virtualised environment. Since I started my new role, I’ve been exposed to XenDesktop, XenApp, Login VSI and a whole raft of other tools. The interesting thing about the “new” EUC space is that it forces you to turn traditional desktop approaches on their heads. For example, Windows is written based around the fact that it usually has a local disk all to itself, that it can thrash to it’s heart’s content, without having to worry about running into other resources trying to land grab from it. In a virtualised EUC environment, this is no longer true. There can be several dozen virtual machines booting at once, logon storms, anti-virus scans and a whole batch of other processes going on simultaneously that are competing for the same disk resource.

Additionally, in the days of server consolidation (the phase 1 of mainstream virtualisation, if you will), capacity planning tools such as VMware Capacity Planner or PlateSpin Recon would be set up to capture performance metrics from physical servers, to essentially baseline what CPU, disk and memory resource was being used, so that the virtual equivalent could be appropriately sized for performance. In the EUC space, this is no longer sufficient. As well as capturing the previous metrics, we also need to look at additional detail based around the end user experience. If logon to a server console is slow, generally no-0ne but the admin would notice, and as frustrating as it might be, it’s generally tolerated and goes unreported. In the EUC world, when several dozen users logon at the same time and experience is degraded, IT will get to know about it pretty quickly.

As such, the likes of Login VSI help to determine the performance of the EUC experience using real world examples such as Outlook, Flash and manipulation of large spreadsheets. Traditional capacity planning tools are very useful for obtaining basic figures on specifications, but lack the insight to analyse application performance and the impact on a virtual desktop environment.

Away from such matters, it’s also interesting to look at applications. As I remarked at a BrainShare event presentation several years ago (before iPads and VDI in 2007), the apps drive the platform, not the other way around. Generally, users don’t care if it’s Mac, Linux, Windows, iPad, Android or Etch a Sketch, as long as they can get access to their line of business applications in a usable manner. The underlying layer of the OS generally just becomes another commodity item. I didn’t think I was being particularly visionary back then, just a pragmatic view based on the way I approached things as an end user.

Whilst enterprise applications such as Microsoft Office come with tools for the virtual environment, many core business applications are written in house and are proprietary to the business. As such, they tend not to have enterprise deployment tools, have extensive user communities or knowledge bases, and are written on the “good enough” principle. Again these apps are written with the assumption that the endpoint is a largely static thing, that the hostname doesn’t change and that it never moves around the network or across continents. In the virtual EUC space, this is no longer true and we must now be creative into fooling the app into thinking it’s still living in the traditional desktop environment.

It’s been seven weeks of change, steep learning curves and a change of thinking, but I’m enjoying every minute and it’s certainly the challenge I was hoping for.

Yesterday was my last day at NDS8. I can’t believe it’s been a little over two years since I decided to have a go at life on the road in consulting. It’s been a fun and tiring time, and I’ve learned so much. Not just about technologies, but about project management, business process, other people and mostly myself. I’ve managed to get customers out of some of the strangest of scrapes. I’ve worked late and travelled during my own time at weekends, just so I can turn up bright eyed and bushy tailed at 0900 on Monday morning so that the customer is left with a positive impression.

So why the move? Well it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a couple of months and an unbelievable opportunity came up that I simply could not turn down. From Thursday, I will be employed by Xtravirt Consulting, who are VMware’s EMEA Consulting Partner of the Year 2011. As I remarked to them at my interview and without being sycophantic, this to me is the Champions League of virtualisation jobs. It will take me in a direction far beyond where I am now, making me a far better consultant and giving me some real cutting edge technical skills.

It’s no great secret that the Novell space is shrinking and I’ve been really into virtualisation for years, cloud in the last 6/9 months. I’ve had the privilege of attending VMworld EMEA, and just seeing what a vibrant community of partners, vendors and customers has sprung up around VMware just made me want to be a part of it. It’s where all the innovation is happening right now, and the pace of change is electric. It also means I’ll get a lot more involved in things like storage design, which up until now, had only been at a high level.

In this business, if you fail to evolve you soon get left behind and I’m determined that won’t happen to me. I’m excited, nervous and slightly intimidated about my new role, but that’s how it should be as it will put me on my toes and keep me there!

 

For those looking for it, here is my response to Virgin Media’s “Did we answer your question? How are we doing?”, which was too long to publish on Facebook, Twitter or anything else pithy :-

 

It’s usually a joy to ask a question as one finds the customer service representative doesn’t read it before ploughing headlong into an answer. I’d love to engage them in some badinage and spend three hours re-iterating my initial (simple)question, but I worry life is too short. I still feel that offshoring customer service to India is a fundamental mistake. 

 

They’re polite and courteous, but don’t understand spoken English nuances and it’s a problem that won’t go away until CS returns to the UK. You may think you’re saving company pennies doing this, but it doesn’t help customer loyalty and despite everything, has not improved customer service. I’d wager your budget would be better spent hiring a few of the millions unemployed in the UK to provide a better service at probably the same cost.

Of course I open myself to accusations of racism, but we know in our heart of hearts this isn’t true. It’s generally an excuse peddled by the lazy, who don’t wish to engage in meaningful discussion on the topic. I’ve been to India and they’re wonderful people with a fantastic work ethic but offshoring customer facing operations has been fundamentally flawed from the outset, a fact only a handful of UK companies have grasped.

I’ve opined similar sentiments on previous occasions only to be met by a standard corporate response. I’m happy you’ve read this far, so there is no need really to follow up further. Hopefully it’s entertained as well as informed. This is my raison d’etre!