Articles by Jason Grierson

VCDX – Mock Design – How to attack it?!

October 13, 2018 Jason Grierson 1

Hey, Just wanted to make a quick blog post around some tips and tricks around the mock design question in the VCDX exam.  In the past this gets over looked due to prioritizing your presentation or not practiced enough.  I get a lot of feedback from VCDX candidates either stating this is where they felt they fell a little short in their first defense, or I get a lot of questions on how to attack it. My aim for this blog post is to help give some tips from my experience on how to attack the mock design question and as always generate conversation some good conversation around it.  As the more ways you see people attack it the better […]

Mapping the VCDX Defense Genome Part 3: Is All Flash a Trap?!

January 5, 2018 Jason Grierson 0

Hey everyone, So prior to the holidays I was helping mentor some new VCDX candidates for their re-defenses and was coming across a few trends that I wanted to discuss a little as they started creeping up over and over again.  These trends were All Flash SAN’s, Oversized Compute, and questions being asked that were not part of the candidates design.  We’ll get into the last point a little more but first lest tackle the first two. All Flash SAN Is All Flash SAN a VCDX trap?  No of course not the All Flash SAN is obviously a silver bullet when it comes to storage as it greatly reduces the complexity of the storage system while giving amazing performance.  Gone […]

VCDX Defense Presentation: Mapping it’s genome

May 10, 2017 Jason Grierson 1

So after hours of working on your design, submission, and with some patient waiting you finally get that email from VMware stating your design has been accepted for defense!  Quickly you go into over drive and start ferociously working on your defense presentation.  Now maybe you already started working on your design presentation, maybe you haven’t but I find the questions typically always have a trend of similarity with the biggest one being: HOW do I take a 100-500 page VMware design and cram it into 20-30 presentation slides and get the message across in 75min? So first off why 20-30 slides?  Well taking the 75min you have to defend and dividing that by 20 will leave you roughly 3.75min […]

VCAP-DCV Design vBrownbag Section 2.4

March 29, 2017 Jason Grierson 0

Hello, The other day I had the pleasure of taking part in another vBrownbag in the VCAP-DCV Design series with Ron Wedel covering Objective 2.4 – Build Manageability Requirements into a vSphere 6.x Logical Design This chapter has a lot of great information in it around proper design methodology in the Management silo of APMRS (Availability, Performance, Manageability, Recover-ability, and Security) however it sometimes doesn’t really point you towards exactly what the exam will be asking of you.  So in this session we covered what the exam will ask of you in objective 2.4 and how objective 2.4 prepares you for your VCDX journey around designing Manageability. Below is the slide deck used in the presentation and the link the […]

VCAP6-DCV Design Objective 1.1 on the #vBrownbag

January 12, 2017 Jason Grierson 1

The other week I saw the call to all VCDX volunteers for the vBrownbag series around the new VCAP6-DCV Design exam, so with exam closet to my heart I have volunteered for a few sections.  The first section I really wanted to cover was the Objective 1.1 as this was one of the sections that I really struggled with when I wrote the DCD 5.1/5.5 exam, however the due date didn’t leave me much time to prep a presentation deck.  So over the weekend I gave it the good old college try but was only able to get half way through the presentation due to the length of the chapter.  With that in mind I messaged Gregg letting him know […]

VCAP-DCD6 Just Went GA

July 22, 2016 Jason Grierson 0

Hey All So many of you have been waiting for the new VCAP6 line to launch it seems some of the exams went GA yesterday.  The newly renamed DCD6 – VCAP6-DCV Design has gone GA and information around it can be found here: https://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrReg/plan.cfm?plan=88743&ui=www_cert However it seems they are still working out some registration issues as when I tried to register it wasn’t showing up on Pearson Vue’s site.  So hopefully this will get squared away shortly.  Once I have a chance to sit the exam I will hard at work on developing new material for the DCD simulator 2.0 along with some new documentation to go along with it.  I look forward to getting this new material out there […]

How a certification changed my life

May 16, 2016 Jason Grierson 3

Around this time last year I believe there was a question either on this community or on the VMware forums about how the VCAP program certifications are received in the work place and if they are worth it. Seeing as my blog portion of my website is still under construction to add new sections like my blog, and the new DCD6 simulator.  I really have no better place to post this then vMusketeers. How a certification changed my life: The last year and half has been a whirl wind to say the least, I guess going on 2 years now.  Two springs ago around May I decided to start my VCDX track and achieve my DCA.  After a few months […]