VCDX

Passed VCAP5-DCD!!! v5.5 Exam Experience/Review

May 5, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 0

I took VCAP5-DCD 5.5 and passed with a 334!!! I have to say both VCAP exams are the only 2 I have ever done where I have had no idea whether I was in with a shot of passing once I clicked the finish button! I want to thank everyone in the Google+ DCD group, as seriously without the group and the experiences of everyone in it, I don’t think I would have passed . It is a tough exam, I have found design a tough thing to do, there are so many what ifs and it depends. I have spent long periods of time very confused…but they say confusion comes before understanding… …..and that is true! My journey to the DCD […]

Is the VCDX worth it?

May 2, 2016 Graeme Vermeulen 0

I’m a bit of a certification junkie. I love setting goals to get certifications, booking them… and eventually getting that piece of paper that says I know what I’m doing! I do at times ask myself – “is this really worth all the effort?” I hope that if you ask yourself the same question, this post will help. We go to school for ~12 years, learning about subjects that have very little practical application in the real world. We learn important things like spelling, writing – but do we ever learn how to put together a professional email? In fact, we don’t even learn this in University (unless business administration is one of your majors of course). We learn how […]

The VCDX journey so far…

April 28, 2016 Graeme Vermeulen 0

Well, 2016 is just flying by. It’s scary to think that I’ll be 28 this year. Back in February 2014, I decided that I’d be pursuing the VCDX. I mumbled to my boss at the time “I want to get the VCDX after my VCP is done” – I paid for the course and the exam myself, not getting any training or exams paid for me. I signed up for the VMUG Advantage and got a discount, but it still put me out of pocket by a fair bit. Thinking back now, it was the best decision I ever made! Well, I made a commitment that day. A bit over a year later I had completed both my VCAPs, but […]

So I passed my VCAP5-DCA back in January 2015!

February 11, 2016 Bilal Ahmed 0

Here is a breakdown of how it went and what I did, so if anyone else is considering doing it here ya go! At the time I worked for a Managed Services/DR/BC company so we had a lot of kit sat idle at times, which was free to use for labs! I had a lab setup at work as follows: 5x DL380 g7 in 2 clusters 14TB IBM DS4700 FC SAN 8TB IBM  DS3300 iSCSI SAN Some local storage in each server Windows Server 2008 which ran vCenter and the client ( I installed teamviewer on this pc so I could login from anywhere on my laptop). No AD setup. I had vmotion and iSCSI traffic in one vlan and FT […]