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May 17, 2016
by Gregg Robertson Leave a comment

VCAP6-CMA Design Objective 2.2 – Map Service Dependencies

Knowledge

Evaluate dependencies for infrastructure and application services that will be included in a vRealize Automation design.

One of vRealize Automations biggest selling points is its ability to provision various services and applications be they single tier services or multi-tier services including load balancers and network isolation via NSX. When you are creating a vRealize Automation design for your customers they will have a number of services and applications in mind that they want to make available for consumption via vRA. You job and the point of this section is that you need to discovery and evaluate all of the required infrastructure and application services required.

This can either be existing infrastructure needed by the applications or due to company policies so for example if you are provisioning multiple machines to test code and then commit it back depending on the success or failure then that existing infrastructure might be something like GIT. Or it might need to be tracked via a CMDB so an existing CMDB needs to be available and able to be communicated with via the infrastructure so that it can be logged and tracked. The infrastructure may also be something that needs to be created as part of the service so something like an NSX edge to isolate a service from existing services every time they are deployed would then need to be created as part of the service.

There are various ways to do this and from my experience doing a few normally allows you to cover it pretty well. These are:

· Interviews with existing service owners to understand how it is done at present (if it is being done at present that is)

· Existing documentation around service design if available.

· Design workshops with the current users of a service offering as well as the companies IT team and project sponsors to understand what they want the vRA offering to offer.

· Via usage of VMware vCenter™ Application Discovery Manager which monitors the existing environments, applications and infrastructure and gives you an overview of what the existing services are actually connected to and using for the service. This is a brilliant tool if you have it at your disposal and can also be used in conjunction with vRealize Infrastructure Navigator.

Create Entity Relationship Diagrams that map service relationships and dependencies.

These diagrams are normally created as part of the service design document you should be creating for each service offering you are planning to make available within vRA and so that it is easier to understand what all the interdependencies are between the various components that make up the service.

Don Ward has done a brilliant blog posting all about creating these relationship diagrams and has even given examples of ones.

For the exam they are most likely going to want you to do some drag and drop or even visio style questions for these diagrams so I would make sure you practice creating these kinds of diagrams in visio or paint for applications within your own environment

Analyze interfaces to be used with new and existing business processes.

This is vRealize Infrastructure Navigator work where VIN scans the environment and gives you a mapping of all interfaces that current services are using. There’s a BRILLIANT YouTube video by VMware that covers not just this heading but also the first heading https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uu0bGB7bc4A

Determine service dependencies for logical components.

For service dependencies you can use VIN again as the tool to determine this. The video mentioned above gives a great example of exchange dependencies.

Include service dependencies in a vRealize Automation logical design.

Personally I like to create separate design document for each service design rather than stick it into the vRA logical design but these can be portrayed either via the relationship diagrams or via flow charts showing the dependencies along with definitions of all the required components that make up the service offering.

Analyze services to identify upstream and downstream dependencies.

Again this can be done via VIN and Application Discovery Manager where you can ascertain what is required in what order so for example you will need a SQL database instance up and running before you can deploy a web services web servers and application servers.

Navigate logical components and their interdependencies and make decisions based upon all service relationships.

I take it they are looking for you to see a whole bunch of logical components and are told of their interdependencies and for you to then put them in the correct order to ensure it is built correctly.

Tools

If you think I have something wrong then please let me know as I don’t claim to know everything by any stretch

Gregg

May 17, 2016
by Gregg Robertson Leave a comment

VCAP6-CMA Design Objective 2.3 – Build Availability Requirements into the Logical Design

Knowledge

Evaluate which logical availability services can be used with a given vRealize Automation solution.

For logical availability services this comes down to making sure there are multiple instances of a component if possible and that it is load balanced either via a physical load balancer like F5 or a virtual one like NSX and it is protect via HA and DRS rules are configured for anti-affinity for hosts placement and storage placement. I did a blog posting about designing an enterprise level distributed VRA . As you can see from the diagram I have split out the vRA appliances, IaaS Managers, IaaS Web servers, DEM workers and vSphere Agents and load balanced all the management components via NSX load balancers. The exam is supposedly based on vRA 6.2 so the postgres database is now clusterable between the vRA appliances so it being on an external vRA appliance instance isn’t required anymore.

Differentiate infrastructure qualities related to availability.

This is being able to tell what things apply to what infrastructure quality. If you dn;t know what the infrastructure qualities are then they are Availability, Manageability, Performance, Recoverability and Security. A great definition and break down of what availability is has been done in a blog posting by Rene van den Bedem. This will most likely be drag and drop where you take certain pieces and place them under the different qualities.

Analyze a vRealize Automation design and determine possible single points of failure.

I think this is really self-explanatory as you need to understand how a highly available design is achieved and then pick up on any SPOF. For example if the vRA databases are on a SQL installation that isn’t clustered or protected by HA then this is a SPOF.

Determine potential availability solutions for a logical design based on customer requirements.

Availability can be achieved either via separation of components to allow resiliency in the event of one of the components failing, load balancing components to ensure services aren’t lost if one portion goes down and protection via HA or BC/DR to allow a quick MTD. Look at the vRA reference architecture for a good overview of how to design for resiliency and high availability. Also my blog posting I mentioned earlier covers it nicely if I do say so myself. There is also the two VMware articles around Configuring VMware- vRealize Automation High Availability Using an F5 Load Balancer and Configuring VMware- vCenter SSO High Availability for VMware vRealize Automation

Create an availability plan, including maintenance processes.

Here is where in an ideal world you have done a Business Impact Analysis and determined what their RTO and RPO values are and then started to work out how various design methods and solutions can ensure these SLA’s are maintained as well as maintenance windows where these SLA’s don’t apply. Rene’s posting I mentioned earlier gives a brilliant amount of ideas of what to think about to ensure availability of a solution.

Balance availability requirements with other infrastructure qualities.

This is a part of an design where you need to holistically look at the design and ensure if one decision is made it doesn’t cause impacts to requirements or other decisions and if so if it is worth keeping that method or changing the other one. For example if you are requested to provide 99.999% of availability then this is going to cost the customer a serious amount but also some high level solutions are going to be required to ensure this is met which can impact manageability if the current team don’t have the skill set to manage it once you walk out the door.

Tools

If you think I have something wrong then please let me know as I don’t claim to know everything by any stretch.

Gregg

February 24, 2016
by Gregg Robertson Leave a comment

VCAP6-CMA Design Objective 2.1 – Map Business Requirements to the Logical Design

Due to my decision to aim for my VCDX6-CMA this year and thereby to get it in in time for the only VCDX-CMA defence of the year (so far) I have signed up for the VCAP6-CMA Design beta exam. I’ve been working on a very large-scale vRA 6.2 project for the past 14 months and so I hope this experience of designing and building it as well as my preparations via these objectives breakdown (plus my study resources) and using some of my VCDX5-DCV knowledge will help me. So I thought I would slowly post up each objective for my own benefit but also hopefully help other people looking to pass the VCAP6-CMA Design exam (beta or GA).I will be consolidating all the objectives on my blog page here.

Knowledge

Analyze requirements for functional and non-functional elements.

Analysing requirements and determining if they are functional or non-functional is the same method as you would do for the DCD or DTD exams. I mentioned in an earlier objective breakdown that if it is a constraint it is a non-functional requirement. Although the way I always did it for my DCD is that functional is when something should DO something & non-functional is HOW that something should be done. Scott Lowe covers them nicely in his vSphere Design Trainsignal videos.

Build non-functional requirements into a specific logical design.

This I’ll take it that you will be given non-functional requirements such as the usage of certain storage or networking or a front end portal and have to include it in a Visio style diagram. So using the storage one they might say they have iSCSI storage and you have to ensure you have it designed correctly for the usage of this storage.

Translate stated business requirements into a logical design.

Just like I covered in a previous objective you have to take down the objectives in a number of design workshops and interviews and now that they are defined and are accurate and signed off you can apply this into a logical design. So for example if they have stated they want the solution to cover two sites then you will design for maybe a stretched cluster or two instances running with two clustered vRA appliances with one on each site and the underlying vRA infrastructure below it. The vRA reference architecture gives a great overview of different design outlines and methods.

Incorporate the current state of a customer environment into a logical design.

Really straight forward in my opinion. If they say that their environment has certain storage or number of sites or limitations of networking etc then incorporate that into the design. This will have all been collected from design workshops, current state analysis as mentioned in the previous objective and interviews with SME’s.

VMware Recommended Tools

The VMware recommended study tools for this objective are:

If you disagree with anything I’ve said above then please let me know and if I agree (I’m always open to learning) then I will update the posting. Now onto objective 2.2.

Gregg

February 16, 2016
by Gregg Robertson Leave a comment

VCAP6-CMA Design Objective 1.4 – Identify Existing Business Practices and Organizational Structure

Knowledge

Evaluate the customer-s current capacity requirements.

This can be done by a few methods, the most common two is via capacity planner which is a tool open to VMware partners and VMware themselves which evaluates the current customers environment for a number of weeks and the gives you an output of what is being consumed. The other which I’m certain they will be using for the exam especially seeing as it is one of the study tools recommended for this objective is vRealize Operations. vRealize Operations will give you great indications their current capacity and if it is enough for the solution you are looking to design or not. There is also a management pack for vRealize Operations for vRA so knowing about this and a good base understanding of how vRealize operations works is highly beneficial. The following resources should give you that base knowledge around vROps as well as vRealize Business/ITBM:

Categorize existing workloads.

Again this can be done via vROps and via the usage of dashboards or just via the built in categories provided by vROps. Apart from this I personally can’t see any other ways to cover this piece so if you think of anything then please do let me know.

Recognize organizational structure and governance requirements.

Governance for companies is a major design challenge but is also one of the biggest requirements you have to meet during a project. There are a wide range of governance policies out there from PCI to security hardening to HIPAA. For this piece I am taking it that during a design scenario the customer will mention some kind of governance they need to keep to and this decision will obviously impact how the solution is designed.
Organisational structure is understanding different departments and their possible requirments for separation and seeing as vRealize Business is mentioned in the study tools in the exam blueprint then the ability of vRB to do show-back and chargeback on different departments/Business Groups within vRA.

Analyze application architecture.

This is a lot like a previous sections requirements where you need to understand how an application is architected to meet the requirements of the application. As I mentioned this can be done via your design workshops with the application owners and via vRealize Infrastructure Navigator. Once you have an understanding this can then be mapped out in Application services or via the usage of multi-machine blueprints to name but two options. What they are going to test you on here is most likely diagrams of applications and then understanding how they are configured. Or possibly even a Visio style diagram where you have to take their text information and design the applications architecture in “AS”. Practicing doing this kind of design in Visio is a great way of practicing this skill.

VMware Recommended Tools

The VMware recommended study tools for this objective are:

If you disagree with anything I’ve said above then please let me know and if I agree (I’m always open to learning) then I will update the posting. Now onto objective 2.1.

Gregg

February 16, 2016
by Gregg Robertson Leave a comment

VCAP6-CMA Design Objective 1.3 – Differentiate Requirements, Risks, Constraints and Assumptions

Knowledge

Differentiate between the concepts of risks, requirements, constraints, and assumptions.

Firstly I’ll take it you know the definitions of Risks, Constraints, Assumptions and Requirements. If not I would recommend looking them up and there is great overview in the VMware recommended study resource around CAD’s.
We covered what requirements are, how you would collect them and how they needed to be concise and be mapped to the infrastructure qualities of AMPRS in objective 1.2. During the workshops and interviews you have done with the customer you will also have picked up that a number of their requirements will have been around using certain technologies or certain methods for the project.
A constraint is where the customer has asked you to use a certain vendors storage for example or that you have to use their existing network infrastructure. These are almost always non-functional requirements and your biggest challenge around this is understanding how the technology they have asked for you to use will impact the solution in a holistic manner. There are always constraints in a project and it is your job as the architect to record these and understand them and then determine if these are not going to meet what the customer requires from the solution (using a 1GbE network can be a severe one on a vRA design) , is a risk to the project (the existing storage you have to use for the project is end of life in 18 months’ time and the migration to new storage is currently undefined from the vendor for example) or it actually meets the requirements of the solution and is just a constraint.
Risks as I mentioned above are a fair portion from the constraints but also external risks such as the project is being done the arab emirates and there are seasonal sandstorms that affect the communications to the data centre or it can be down to personnel where the people from the customer due to maintain the project once you leave have never touched VMware technology before. I like to have a risk register where I record all of these, rate them on their severity (Low,Medium,High and Critical) and also the risk mitigation or if there is no mitigation then that the project sponsor or someone high up has accepted this risk. So to use my example of customers IT team having no VMware knowledge or experience they could mitigate the risk by sending people on the required training and that there is dedicated time allocated to them outside BAU work to work with the consultants building the solution to gain knowledge and experience as well as knowledge transfer workshops at the end of the project.
Assumptions are where you can’t get a definitive answer on something that the project relies on and so you have to assume that it will be in place for the success of the project. Assumptions in real life designs should be as minimal as possible as it is your job as the architect to try get clarification on any assumptions but sometimes you have to have assumptions for example that the storage solution purchased from vendor XYZ will be built and configured in a resilient manner to a production level standard seeing as you aren’t the one doing this portion of the design.

Analyze impact of VMware best practices to identified risks, constraints, and assumptions.

“Best practices” are a double edged sword but for the exam these are the gospel and knowing the VMware way of designing it is a must (which is what it was like in the VCAP4-DCD and VCAP5-DCD I sat) . This is fairly straight forward if you understand my points in the section above. VMware best practices are covered largely in the vRealize Automation Reference Architecture document and the vCloud Architecture Toolkit (vCAT) documents.

Given a statement, determine whether it is a risk, requirement, constraint, or an assumption.

Very much the same as above in that if you understand what assumptions, risks and constraints are then you can amp them no problem. I think they only let you choose one quality per statement so my personal rule of thumb was that if it was between a risk and a constraints I chose it as a risk. Referring back to what I said earlier where not all constraints are risks is where you can have this difference in the exam.

VMware Recommended Tools

The VMware recommended study tools for this objective are:

If you disagree with anything I’ve said above then please let me know and if I agree (I’m always open to learning) then I will update the posting. Now onto objective 1.4.

Gregg

February 15, 2016
by Gregg Robertson 1 Comment

VCAP6-CMA Design Objective 1.2 – Gather and Analyze Application Requirements.

Knowledge

Gather and analyze application requirements for a given scenario.

What I believe is being looked for here is for you to having spoken to the stakeholders and more importantly the application owners and worked out what exactly they require for their applications and the interdependencies the applications have. Applications can be standalone and require no outside communication or could be multi-tiered and require access to the internet or a public git repository for example. Asking the right questions and fully understanding what the applications do and require will then allow you to provide what is required or if it isn’t available start making plans to make it available.

Determine the requirements for a set of applications that will be included in the design.

This is exactly the same as above in my opinion but now instead of just one application you need to get a holistic idea of all the applications in a multi-machine blueprint for example and all the requirements these have to work whilst also not impacting other workloads.

Collect information needed in order to identify application dependencies.

This is done by speaking to the application owners and then validating yourself as even though the application owners say they need certain things you need to validate this and ensure that they are correct and that putting it into the vRA solution doesn’t require another method of doing something. For example maybe the physical F5 load balancers can’t be used for load balancing applications deployed within the vRA solution so you either need to open firewalls to allow this or deploy maybe NSX load balancers within the environment to allow this capability. In the blueprint they recommend the Foundations and Concepts document which is good but personally I think you need to know much much more than the foundations to understand application dependencies and how they would fit within vRA.
They recommend the vRealize Infrastructure Navigator User-s Guide as a study tool and this is certainly a great method of looking at existing applications and understanding heir interdependencies and what the applications are talking to. This also makes sure that the application isn’t talking to some old database server in the background that Joe Blogs setup before he got retrenched and no one has known about since. VIN is a great tool and there’s loads of free videos and resources you can use to learn about the product like this VMware YouTube video.

Given one or more application requirements, determine the impact of the requirements on the design.

Again this is understanding holistically what the applications are talking to and require and then ensuring it is available within the environment or communicable from the environment (services like AD, DNS,IP Management etc). I’m not really sure how you can learn more about this without experience of differing products but understanding how multi-tiered applications work and require resilient back-end resources to function is very important (think of a web applications with multiple web servers, application server and a DB)

VMware Recommended Tools

The VMware recommended study tools for this objective are:

If you disagree with anything I’ve said above then please let me know and if I agree (I’m always open to learning) then I will update the posting. Now onto objective 1.3.

Gregg

February 15, 2016
by Gregg Robertson Leave a comment

VCAP6-CMA Design Objective 1.1 – Gather and Analyze Business Requirements.

Due to my decision to aim for my VCDX6-CMA this year and thereby to get it submitted in time for the only VCDX-CMA defence of the year (so far) I have had to sign up for the VCAP6-CMA Design beta exam. I’ve been working on a very large-scale vRA 6.2 project for the past 14 months and so I hope this experience of designing and building it as well as my preparations via these objectives breakdown(plus my study resources) and using some of my VCDX5-DCV knowledge will help me. So I thought I would slowly post up each objective for my own benefit but also hopefully help other people looking to pass the VCAP6-CMA Design exam (beta or GA).I will be consolidating all the objectives on my blog page here.

Knowledge

Associate a stakeholder with the information that needs to be collected.

This is down to the questions you need to ask and also who you need to ask these questions. These questions are ones you are going to ask during the design workshop for the design/project. For the workshop you need to make sure you have the applicable project participants/stakeholders who can join the workshops (depends if you want one big one where people come and go at certain points or multiple ones where you speak to each business unit/ team). For the stakeholder meetings/design workshops I personally like to try bring in the following people, this does vary depending on the project and what has been chosen but 9/10 times these are the people you want to speak to:

Virtualisation administrators (if applicable. If not already present then future administrators of the solution)
Server Hardware Administrators
Backup Administrators
Storage Administrators
Desktop/OS Administrators
Network Administrators
Application Administrators (these are very important as their applications may have very specific requirements)
Security Officer
Project Sponsors
End users/ Developers/ Help desk personnel (this I find is helpful to find out what are the current support desk tickets/problems the company are facing and if these will impact the project in any way. Also these discussions are easy to have in the hallway/over a coffee but have alerted me to unknown risks that would have severely impacted the design and delivery)

Utilize customer inventory and assessment data from the current environment to define a baseline state.

This is a really strange one for a vRA design as this normally applies for a vSphere design where you are possibly migrating workloads into a new environment but I’ll take this as possibly an assessment of the current vSphere estate and if it is a fit for the customers’ requirements from vRA. This is still conceptual so basic things like sites connectivity possibilities if they want off site DR or stretched clusters.
This could also mean the workloads being created on the vRA portal as catalogue items are currently workloads running somewhere and an analysis of these to determine possibly sizing metrics to have for example 1000 of a certain developer workstation in the vRA environment is a possibility. Also if the workstations all require isolation from each other for something like CD/CI then you will know you will need Level 4-8 capabilities to provide this isolation from NSX or Palo Alto for example.

Analyze information from customer interviews to explicitly define customer objectives for a conceptual design.

· I think this is fairly straight forward as from the design workshops and interviews you have collected what their objectives are and also ensured from all the workshops there are no obvious conflicts of people’s plans for the solution they want you to design. A “normal” customer objectives piece would be:
- Customer XYZ has embarked on a strategy to increase extensively the level of automation and the rate of virtualization of data centre services. The intention is to enable application and system owners to consume on demand services as a catalogue-based service through a web portal. By initiating this project, XYZ aims to create a platform for IT service delivery that:
  - Is cost-effective through improved resource utilization with the use of cloud management software.
  - Can host 1000 developer workloads.
  - Increases agility through the use of automation and virtualization provided by cloud management software.
  - Is accessible through the use of their custom XYZ-Cloud portal for the consumption of IT Services.
- Customer XYZ has chosen VMware vRealize™ Automation™ to provide their Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS).

Given results of a requirements gathering survey, develop requirements for a conceptual design.

Again this should be relatively straight forward for anyone as you’ve now spoken to all the applicable people and have taken down all their requirements and ensured there are no requirements conflicts. Requirements have to be very precise so that there is no misinterpretation that could cause scope creep and it forces you to ensure you know exactly what the customer requires and that they validate this as correct before you start the logical design. For example a requirement of “Customer wants high availability” is far too vague as everyone might have a different understanding of what high availability means. Your requirement should be “Customer wants 99.99% availability for the front end portal and 99.9% availability for consumer workloads outside of scheduled maintenance windows”. You would also include RPO and RTO values for these in my opinion in subsequent requirements so that SLA mapping is clear.

Categorize business requirements by infrastructure quality to prepare for a logical design.

I’m glad this is mentioned here as for the VCDX they are very big advocates for mapping your requirements to the infrastructure qualities. If you don’t know what the infrastructure qualities are they are:
- Availability
- Manageability
- Performance
- Recoverability
- Security
So for example my previous concise requirement would fall under Availability, application of PCI/SOX/Hardening guidelines would fall under security, and ability to run the 1000 developer workloads would be performance.
This is also very helpful if you are doing requirements mapping from the conceptual requirements to the logical design decisions to the physical design decisions.

VMware Recommended Tools

The VMware recommended study tools for this objective are:

If you disagree with anything I’ve said above then please let me know and if I agree (I’m always open to learning) then i will update the posting. Now onto objective 1.2.

Gregg

February 5, 2016
by Gregg Robertson Leave a comment

VCAP6-CMA Design Study Resources

A very quick posting around the creation of my new VCAP6-CMA Design study resources page now that the beta exam has been released. As I have done in the past for the VCP5 and VCAP5-DCV exams, I have started building a list of resources I will be using for the beta and if I don’t make the mark then the GA exam for the VCAP6-CMA design. If you feel I’ve missed any resources please do let me know as these pages seem to be very popular and so everyone can benefit with top class resources.

For those signed up for the beta, good luck!

Gregg

February 3, 2016
by Gregg Robertson 7 Comments

VCAP6 Design Beta Exams Released

A very quick posting around the release of the VCAP6 design beta exams. I know the internal VMware round was happening this week and now they have opened the design beta exams for the DTM,CMA and DCV https://blogs.vmware.com/education/2016/02/new-vcap6-beta-exams-now-available.html . make sure you register for the one you want most first as the validation can take a bit of time and you can only do one authorisation at a time it seems. Here’s hoping the VCAP6 beta exams go better that the VCP6 beta exams did.

Gregg

October 30, 2015
by Gregg Robertson 6 Comments

VCDX Spotlight – It’s Me =0)

So I promised Mark Brookfield that if I managed to get an illustrious VCDX number I would let him do a VCDX Spotlight on me. So he formulated the following questions and I answered them as below:

1. Wow… what a journey. You’ve come a long way, but you’ve finally made it. You are VCDX # 205, congratulations! How do you feel?

I’m in utter disbelief at the moment and keep looking at the email to ensure I haven’t misread it somehow. I think it will sink in over the next few days but when you’ve been aiming for something for so long and sometimes wonder if you’ll ever be good enough to obtain it, it’s crazy to get the number.

2. You’ve made no secret of the fact that you didn’t make the grade the first time around. What would you say you did differently for your second attempt?

Quite a few things. I’ve mentioned some of them in my blog posting about my second attempt but the main ones were:

· To start earlier so I didn’t burn out and could also find time to spend with my young family.

· Not stop preparing even after submitting.

· Leaving nothing in the tank.

· Taking a week’s annual leave before the defence (last time I worked the day before and day after my defence).

· More experience in front of demanding customers. My current project certainly gave me confidence that I belonged in that defence room and my panelists were my peers.

3. After you initial rejection, did you feel like quitting? If so, what motivated you to try again?

Oh absolutely and as I told to Josh Odgers after one of our mock sessions I actually thought about giving up on virtualisation totally and doing a new job. The failure is really really hard to take and I agree somewhat when people say it isn’t life or death but after putting in so much time and sacrificing so much it’s hard to then not make the grade and know you may have to do as much if not more than you did last time.

I think I had a few motivations, my wife was very supportive and is a massive blessing in my life with her belief in me and looking after our daughter when I’m locked away in my study. The motivation to not know myself as the person who failed the VCDX and gave up, how can I tell me daughter to not give up trying if I don’t live like that myself? Also wanting to better myself and complete what I had started.

4. In some circles, certification is regarded as a waste of time. What makes the VCDX so special?

Believe it or not I somewhat agree it is a waste of time if you don’t do it for the right reasons. One of the questions I ask in my VCDX spotlights is about what has changed and more often than not people lives haven’t changed dramatically and some haven’t changed at all. I use all my certifications to force myself to learn new things as I’m actually naturally quite a lazy person who needs to be pushed. Like I said in my VCDX blog posting I know there’s people who spent 40 hours on their designs, submitted and passed first time and credit to those people but I wanted to learn as much as possible along the way so that I could truly say and agree it was about the journey.

The VCDX is special as it isn’t about regurgitating information or sadly in some circles is open to people using cheat sheets. The VCDX is about building a design that is worthy of the defence but the true test is explain that design to a panel who know when you are faking it and who also want to know why you didn’t choose other options and if you did what would be the impacts of that. Real world customers change their minds all the time and sometimes architects just accept what is told or given to them by customers rather than challenging them and trying to work out what is best for them. The VCDX teaches you this. Also with just over 200 people with it globally it shows you that it takes a lot of effort to be at that level to achieve it.

5. The road to even submitting a defence is long and arduous; I myself recently failed the VCAP5-DCD. What advice would you give to others who may be struggling?

So I failed the VCAP-DCD the first time as well and failed my VCAP4-DCA twice so don’t feel bad about failing. Learn where you were weak and try again. It’s a cliché but it’s true that it is about the journey and you have to take failures as a lesson, regroup and go at it again. One of the first things I mention in my VCDX posting is about starting early and setting a timeline of when you want to defend. Also for those who fail the VCDX the first time I know it’s painful but there are some big names who failed first time (I’m not meaning me here) and are now double VCDX’s.

6. Where to now? Kick back with a beer or onto something else?

So a bit of a break but I did make a loose plan than when I passed this defence I would maybe look at going for double VCDX and submitting a version of my current vRA design. This won’t be until next year and I might do a joint submission with a friend but at present I actually need to learn some vSphere 6 and vRA 7 as I have to pay the bills and new technology is what allows me to do that. I’m also starting a VCP6-CMA series on the vBrownbag so will be spending some of my now freed up time there and I have a second clone on the way in April next year so I’m certain that will keep me busy.