Tuesday, January 3, 2017

VCP 6 passed

Shortly before Christmas, I took, and managed to pass the VCP6 Delta exam (2V0-621D), to further extend my VCP status by another 2 years (not really a fan of the need to do this, but ultimately the choice is do it or lose it).

Personally, I found the exam a bit tougher than the previous VCP exams. Now, whether that was because it was the Delta (and so in theory, they can concentrate on asking more detailed/specific questions, as it should focus on the changes between vSphere 5 and vSphere 6) I don’t know. It could be that as I use the VMware technologies covered by the VCP-DCV all day every day (it’s my day job), it was actually a bit tougher to then sit down and do the necessary reading (ie, the temptation to go “oh, I know this, I’m skipping it”). The risk with that of course, is that :

1) I don’t know if all - this of course, goes without saying.
2) I need to focus on the areas that I feel less confident in, or that we don’t use all day every day - resource pools are a good example of this, they’re not something we use much at all. But picking out those areas becomes more tedious.

Ultimately, that’s all just an excuse for not preparing as thoroughly as I would’ve liked, and I think I was probably a bit complacent (plus there are more “interesting” things to be working on that revising for what I think I already know - see the end of this entry for the kind of thing I mean. Still managed to pass with (what to me was) an acceptable score.

Resources used :

Well, it’s the usual kind of thing.
1) The Blueprint (I do wish they kept it as a PDF or a single file download at least, I don’t like the current presentation of it).
2) VMware documentation - as mentioned above, I struggled here, just because of the whole idea of re-reading the same stuff again - need to be wary of this, as obviously there are (significant) changes.
3) Mastering vSphere 6 - from my Safari subscription - didn’t use this as much as previous versions - again complacency on my behalf.
2) Practical work - as I said, it’s my day job, so I’m using it every day, but personally I’m poor at remembering menu options or anything like that (I just “do” tasks, I don’t think too much about the menu structure or what the labels are etc. I also try to script more and more these days, so prefer to not rely on the GUI if I can help it). So it’s a combination of my paid work, and things in the home lab.

Anyway, it’s done and dusted for a few more years, which is a relief, as there’s plenty more to work with, given the recent release of 6.5, and the associated technologies - vSAN, vROPS, vRA, Orchestrator etc. Plus I’d like to look more at NSX (may be a struggle, as I’m not a Network person), and other areas such as Openstack, AWS and Azure to name a few.