VCDX Design submission. Mission accomplished.

Doing the VCDX design in these two weeks has been a crazy ride, I spent near twelve hours a day creating, drawing and reviewing a (in my opinion) great documentation.

As many others before me I can clearly say that this is the most challenging part in the whole VCDX experience, sure, the Enterprise Admin exam was tricky, and studying for the Design exam was a thought task (the blueprint wasn’t that clear…) but compiling the Application Form and preparing all the documentation as requested by VMware was a really demanding task. Doing that with a two weeks deadline was an epic job for me, I’m not used to that pressure .

But now that I submitted the design I can sleep tight at night, if the design will be accepted I’ll defend the first week of November in Cambridge, MA.

I wish to thank my wife for supporting me and for yelling at me at 3am forcing me to go to bed

Technorati Tags: VCDX, VMware, Design

VMware Design Exam, been there, done that!

Like many before, I borrow this post title from (the always great) Duncan Epping to say that I’ve sit through the Design Exam and PASSED!

This time I scored 400, a little better than my VCE310, which in my opinion was much harder.

The day before taking the test I did an extensive research on the Internet to see what the other who passed VCD310 were saying about the test, and after taking it I can affirm that everyone was right there was one of the multiple-answer question with a duplicated answer, leading to an impossible to answer question, also the design portion was quite messy, I completed it with 10 seconds left but I’m sure that my drawing was awful.

Right now I should be on holiday but I’m neck-deep into the VCDX application form, I’m trying to reach the last deadline for VCDX3 defenses which is August 30th, wish me luck!

Technorati Tags: VMware, vSphere, VCDX, VCD310

VCD310 is up next!

So I finally booked my VCD310 Exam on August 12th, it’s the last “routine” exam before the most challenging part: the Design Defense (my knees start to shake when I say that). I started to collect some exam preparation material from the “usual suspects” and here’s a quick recap for my (and your) memory:

Duncan Epping: VCDX Design Exam, how to prepare?

Joep Piscaer: VMware VCDX Design Exam Preparation Resources

Now I just need to cross my fingers and study hard!

I passed VCE310 and all I got was this lousy T-shirt

So finally my score sheet has arrived and it says “GRADE: PASS”

It’s been a long ride, I had to fly to the UK to take this exam because it seems that Italy is really considered a third world country in terms of testing facilities, fortunately my Uncle lives in London so it was a nice excuse to stop by and say hello.

I arrived in Holborn early to complete all the registration mumbo-jumbo and then I started my exam. I completed it in almost two hours and what struck me the most was the Lab portion.

It was a MESS.

Not the questions, those were clever, and very straightforward, the problem was the infrastructure underneath:

- The same VI3 installation was used by MANY people before, and wasn’t cleaned up, there were leftovers all around and I don’t know if they have impacted the final score.

- The switch mechanism between the test and the lab was a real kludge, every time I clicked the switch button a large portion of the screen was unreadable, I had to resize a window on the screen and use it as a “wiper”.

- Loss of connectivity, a couple of times I had to stop working on an exercise because the connection with the lab was lost, very frustrating.

Said that, the “traditional” portion of the exam was clever, in my opinion the VCP exam should be more like the Enterprise Admin Exam, it’s more focused on real problems, commands and scenarios rather than recalling maximums from memory.

If you’re taking this exam (I doubt it since VCAP4-DCA exams are already out there) the BEST guide is the Exam Blueprint from VMware, also check out this blog post from the great Duncan Epping: VCDX Enterprise Exam prep material.

I hope to take the VCD310 Design Exam really soon, I’d like to make my Design Defense in 2010.

My first step on the VCDX ladder

Last wednesday I took the VCE310 exam, the first step towards the VCDX path.

I don’t know the results yet because the Live Lab portion needs to be examined by hand and it takes near 10 days to do so, in fact this waiting is killing me

I think I did pretty well, the Lab portion was quite simple to me, instead I found the questions quite challenging, especially those on the exact syntaxes for esxcfg-* commands, in my opinion those notions should not be memorized because they’re quite volatile and are always just a man command away.

Now I’m just waiting for the results and hopefully for the invitation to the design exam (or the new VCAP4-DCA).

Ciao,

Fabio