Virtualization

My ride from VCAP DCD to VCAP DCV till VCIX6

01 Jun 2017 by Uma Panda

VMware VCAP6-DCV Deploy exam has total time of 205 minutes with 27 questions, which is lesser than the old VCAP5-DCA exam. No time extension has been granted for people based out of none native English countries. The time extension would have helped to complete few more questions and review all of them at once . The new lab was well laid out and the control centre Windows desktop was very much responsive. The control of the questions made the whole experience feel like a VMware Hands On Lab. The old VCAP5-DCA exam was badly slow and during the exam it was crashed 3 times for me, but the new VCAP6-DCV experience is so nice. The questions are also not too long as compared to old VCAP5-DCA. Thanks to VMware for this pleasant enhancement in VCAP6-DCV exam. This is my third VCAP attainment and the only common thing what I have “vRealized” is, we don’t need to apply all of our working experience in exam. Just need to focus what has been asked to do and apart from that nothing is desirable.

There was also no screen refresh lag. For my previous VCAP5-DCA there were continuous screen refresh issues and every click was taking time to execute. This time the whole lab was extremely responsive, tasks executed so quickly and even the web-client didn’t crash once. Use the still use C# client generously and don’t use the web-client unless the task requires it. If any question is not in your comfort zone then good to mark it down and move on with comfortable questions and then come back to the more challenging questions. In case you have plenty of time left to look up the PFDs in documentation folder to answer the tougher questions. I believe there was close to 40 documents provided by VMware to refer during the exam.

The challenging task was, Backspace are not working. I tried to use Backspace several times and was ending up going back with arrow keys and then using delete. So kindly use the left or right arrow keys with the delete key instead of the backspace key. Particularly this will be useful during the ESXi CLI troubleshooting tasks. In exam lab there might be few things already created with minor spelling errors so make sure of such things before you re-create the items.

Read the complete question because the last line might be the turning point of the entire scenario so don't perform anything in hurry. Example - if it asks to create a new VM, just do it as needed but don't attempt to install the guest OS and neither try to power on the VM, if it’s not asked. One more example – if it asks to create a new alarm, just do it as described but don't attempt to configure SMTP, until unless it asks to do it. Also focus on #esxcfg and #esxcli command line utilities. Let's assume there is a need to rectify the existing powerCLI script, then I suggest to look in to it from an admin point of view, not from a developer’s perspective because there might be very minimal mistake so do not modify the script completely. There are just few suggestions based on my couple of VCAP's experience. Not necessarily to be very useful to you for all VCAP exams.

If there is any text in the manual you would like to copy. Simply select the text, it will appear an icon like “+”. Just drag the selected text to where you would like it copied and release. But be very careful while selecting the text. If you have inadvertently select all the text on the page and drag it over, you will have to wait for all the text to copy over. Such process may take some time and there is no way to interrupt the transfer once it starts. So be cautious on text selection. This will be very much useful throughout the exam to copy the credentials, resource pool name, cluster name, VM name, Hostname, IP, Netmask etc. This will help to evade human errors during troubleshooting.

While I have waited for 2 weeks for the old VCAP5-DCA result but this time the scoring of deployment exams is fairly quick and I received the result via email within an hour of finishing the exam and passed thankfully. Finally earned the milestone for VMware VCIX6-DCV. Now it’s time to prepare for VCIX6-CMA.

My Top 20 Preparation Topic List:

Note: Do not restrict your preparation to this 20 topics only, follow the complete blue print for the exam.

VMware vSphere Network I/O Control management - Pubs , Pubs
VMware vSphere dvSwitch management – KB 2034602 , KB 1029498
VMware vSphere scratch partition management - KB 1033696
VMware vSphere syslog management – KB 2003322 , KB 1005030 , Pubs
VMware vSphere Update Manager administration – KB 1019545 , Pubs
VMware ESXi certificate management – KB 2113926 , Pubs , Pubs , Pubs , Pubs
Managing iSCSI LUN – KB 2000552 , Pubs , Pubs
VMware vMotion troubleshooting – KB 1003734 , KB 2141355 , KB 2042654
VMware VMkernel configuration management - KB 1010614 , Pubs
VMware EVC management – KB 1013111 , KB 2014835 , Pubs , Pubs
VMware vSphere LUN masking – KB 1009449 , Pubs , Pubs
VMware vSphere resource pool management – Pubs , Pubs , Calculator
VMware vSphere HA management – KB 1026442 , KB 1030320 , KB 2033250 , KB 1002117 , Pubs
VMware vSphere host profile management – Blogs , Pubs , Pubs , Pubs
VMware vSphere vVOL management – KB 2113013 , Pubs
VMware vSphere vSAN management – KB 2106708 , KB 2058368
Vmware vSphere content library management – Blogs , Pubs , Pubs , Pubs
VMware ESXi log management – KB 2004810 , KB 2032076
Configuring IPSEC in VMware vSphere ESXi – KB 1021769 , KB 1000880 , Pubs , Pubs
Hands on Labs: HOL-SDC-1602 , HOL-SDC-1627 , HOL-SDC-1604 , HOL-SDC-1607

My Top 20 Reference Materials:

VMware VMware VCAP VMware VCAP5-DCA VMware VCAP6-DCV VMware VCIX6-DCV VCAP VCIX VCAP-DCA VCAP-DCV

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Reviews

Philippract
29/11/2017 05:55 AM

Very useful information and well written. Thanks for sharing.
3
William
22/11/2017 03:06 PM

Congrats buddy n thanks a lot for sharing these details.... It really helps.....
4