While VCDXSanta has missed Christmas day this time, he still delivered my VCDX gift box today. To be more accurate VCDXSanta has left my VCDX gift box at FedEX office and requested me to pick it up. When I went to the VCDX office I had no clue what the package I got and they refused to share any information about it with me on the phone. I was actually surprised to see how large of a package I got knowing that I did not order anything that big lately. As soon I read the address on the package I was able to tell its my VCDX goodies & swapped my phone and took a picture of the package at the FedEX office which got them to give me a weird look as I had no clue what package I am expecting when I arrived there and now shooting a photo of the package. Below is a picture of the box before even picking it up!

I know I have not been the first to receive the package or share what included in it on a blog, as there was a nice blog post at http://www.gabbs.com/2012/12/17/vcdx-2012-christmas-treat/ which show pictures of each of the items and detail descriptions. Though I still wanted to write my own post about for three reasons:

1- Thanks the full VCDX Certification/Marketing Team (Mark Brunstad, Melissa Tuite, Kathleen Tandy, Jill Liles, Carolynn Santos, Erik Ullanderson). Sorry if I missed anyone, but I know both teams had worked quite hard in getting this to our hands by Christmas!

2- I have order the non-alcoholic package, and wanted to share the difference between the two packages. Yes, being able to pick between Alcoholic and none Alcoholic package was a nice touch.

3- Share the news/reason behind these treats with my readers to encourage more brave souls to attempt the VCDX Certification. These treats were sent as a matter of celebrating the number of VCDX holders hitting the 100 mark. This seems to be an important mark to both the certification and marketing team at VMware, & I can see the VCDX Certificate getting more attraction in the near future.

Although when I chose the non-alcoholic package I was thinking the gift will be a quite expensive alcoholic drink and by switching to a none alcoholic I thought I will get that replaced with something that I can keep rather than something to drink and forget about next morning. I was surprised when the package arrive that it included a lot of stuff and the alcoholic part was much smaller part of the package and in the non-alcoholic package the only difference was the replacement of the 6-pack of VCDX Special Ale was replaced by 6-pack of VCDX 100 root Beer. Lol, at least I will drink these and will not forget that I drank them in the morning! Though I can not complain as the package had a lot of nice gadgets in it and one of them was on my Santa Wish List for the year, where no one guessed it(HD Camcorder but with my VCDX number in there its just priceless!).

While what is in the package is very similar to the alcoholic one, below is a list of all the items included in the package and few pictures. I tried to keep the list wording very similar to the one posted at gabbs.com to ensure people can easily compare the two lists. Though I swapped anything to related to drinking to the end of the list.

1x Solid vase, with VCDX logo, my name, and my cert number etched into the base
1 x Leeman Binder, with VCDX logo embossed, along with my initials
1 x Fleece Jacket, embossed with VCDX logo, and my certification number embroidered on it
1 x Polo shirt, with VCDX logo embroidered on.
1 x HD Camcorder with my VCDX number right on it(Christmas Wish List!)
1 x VCDX Logo cooler (with bottle opener attached)
2 x VCDX logo beer glasses
1 x 6-pack of VCDX 100 Root Beer

At last, I would like to thank the full VCDX team and VCDX holders for making this possible. I encourage those brave souls out there who think they got what it take to be a VCDX, to start their VCDX journey today and reserve their seat(Magical number!).

Today in the morning when I opened my e-mail, I could not believe my eyes when I got the congratulation letter for being VCDX#89 after defending two weeks back in Toronto. My trip running for VCDX has spanned over three years. I have completed the per-requisites for VCDX3 before the last VCDX3 defense, but I could not defend as it was held in the US and I failed to obtain the Visa on time back then. After that I have upgraded my design to vSphere 4 & passed VCP4 & VCAP-DCD and was looking for the opportunity to defend when the defense come close by & here its right in my town in Toronto two weeks back. During my VCDX Trip I have changed companies once, Changed position 3 times, changed countries three times, & even change continent from Middle East(Asia) to Canada(North America). It was a hell of a trip with all these busy moves, but it was well worth it. If things go all around again, I would still for sure run for it.

For those of you planning to attempt the defense I am going to give you some free tips below that I wish I would have followed before the exam. I believe they might be some where out there, but I just did not get across them while preparing.

- What should be on your defense presentation?  To be honest I am still not sure my self how are you graded for your presentation, though the first recommendation I would give you is to keep it as short as possible. Try to shoot for 12 minutes presentation. I know the blue print say 15 minutes, but hey while practicing my presentation at home I was able to complete it in about 16 minutes where in the front of the panel with a couple of questions it took me over 30 minutes.  Having many slides in there and having to speed up through it got me a bit shaky when the panelist started to ask questions. I believe your best interest will be to keep the presentation as short as possible where you only cover your project background and top decisions you have made. Though keep all the slides with tons of your logical and physical design diagrams after the questions slide. Trust me you will need them, but you only want to bull them when asked about them. I have felt the purpose of the defense part was more about the panelist asking you questions about your design rather than you presenting the design.

- Try to get your presentation to cover a decision or so on each scoring criteria as per the blueprint. This will help you to score in each area of the exam as panelist might remember the questions they had about that particular area.

- Make sure you know every components in your design. If you have used anything beside vSphere (Ex: vCD, SRM, Storage, Network gears, and anything else you decided to use) make sure you know that product as good as you know vSphere. Anything in the design is a fair game for the panelist to ask you about. Trust me if you have a weakness in a particular product or arena, the panelist will ask about it. As you have 3-5 VCDX panelist normally with each of them specialized in a different arena you can bet your pain point will vary and if you have a weakness in anything included in the design make sure its covered before you head to the defense as I am sure you will find some weakness that you have never thought off on the defense day so don’t make these adds to the one you know about. I have been caught at two occasions in the defense where I had to admit that I was not sure about specific item and explained to the panelist where I would find the answer. Its much better to admit it in these situations, rather wasting your defense time getting in a deeper trouble of showing ignorance.

- Try to practice the scenario part & the trouble shooting part before heading to the defense. Its tough to figure out what scenario will be facing you, but you can at least practice what questions would you use to speed up the process of getting to the solution.

- If you are working on submitting your design, make sure your operations & installation manuals are highly customized for your customers. Example if you are setting up certain port groups setting for the customer in your design make sure how to configure these are covered in your installation manual. This is buried some where in the blue print, but it can help you get few extra point I believe else would not be mentioned in the blue print.

Congrats for all those who passed the VCDX defense in Toronto, & hope the above tips help more of you pass your upcoming defense. At last I would like to thank my family (Mom, My wife, Kids) on their patient with me during this period as well my manager support. Thanks you all for standing by me during the full process.

I have taken my VMware Design Exam few days back, which I almost missed as my hotel totally forgot about my wake up call & my mobile (which I use as my alarm) ran out of battery. After taking the exam, I can not agree anymore with others who took the exam, its more of an administration than a design exam. Further, few questions did not have the right answer or did not work correctly. Two question where you do the matching did not have the proper answers rather had duplicate answers, which I have seen many posts about it from up to 1 year back. Its amazing that it has been not functioning for that long and never been fixed.

The last question which was the design drawing question was too short on time. I mean the amount of reading you have to do to answer the question & getting used to the drawing tools would really require more time than the amount provided on the exam. Yes, as many others the exam has timed out on me while I was only half-way done with my design.

Though after all I am glad its all over & I have successfully completed my VMware Design Exam & now got to start preparing my application. I heard that is when the real work start, so I will start preparing for that. Any recommendation or hint you will leave in the comment area will be highly appreciated.

I thought I will leave a few tips of what to study for the VMware Design Exam. To be honest after taking the exam I have discovered that no matter how many materials you will study before the VMware Design Exam, if you have no real life experience you will suffer through the exam. VMware have done a good job at this part at least.

Though below are what I have reviewed for the exam:

Storage Study Guides:

3994_RAID_WhichOne_v112.pdf: Help you understand the different raid levels, the differences, & when to use each.

esx_san_cfg_manage.8.17 & esx_san_cfg_manage.8.18 & vi3_35_25_npiv_config.pdf :  These three guides include good info of NPIV in VMware enviornment.

iSCSI_design_deploy: Its a must for covering iSCSI Design in VMware enviornment.

VI3 SAN Design Deploy: Great SAN Design in VMware environment document.

vi3_35_25_u2_san_cfg: SAN Configuration in VMware environment document.

High Availability & Business Continuity Guides:

07Q2_dr_solution.pdf: Disaster Recovery Solutions VMware white paper

disaster_recovery.pdf: Making Your Business Disaster Readywith Virtual Infrastructure white paper

practical_guide_bcdr_vmb.pdf: A Practical Guide to Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery with VMware Infrastructure

vi3_35_25_u2_mscs.pdf: Setup for Microsoft Cluster Service in VMware environment guide.

VMwareHA_twp.pdf: VMware High Availability Concepts, Implementation, and Best Practices.

Duncan HA Deep Dive:  A great VMware High Availability Deep Dive by the VMware 007.

Resource Management:

drs_performance_best_practices_wp.pdf:  DRS Performance and Best Practices White Paper.

performance_char_vmfs_rdm.pdf: Performance Characterization of VMFS and RDM Using a SAN

vi3_35_25_u2_resource_mgmt.pdf: VMware Resource Management Guide

VMware Backup:

esx_backup_wp.pdf: Using VMware ESX Server & VMware Infrastructure for Backup, Restoration, and Disaster Recovery White Paper.

vcb_best_practices.pdf: VMware Consolidated Backup: Best Practices and Deployment Considerations

vi3_35_25_u2_vm_backup.pdf:  Virtual Machine Backup Guide

Security:

connections-ports-esx-v3.pdf: Connections & Ports in VMware ESX & VMware ESXi.

vi3_security_architecture_wp.pdf:  Security Design of the VMware Infrastructure 3 Architecture White Paper.

vi3_security_hardening_wp.pdf: VMware Infrastructure 3 Security Hardening

Misc:

vi3_vum_10u2_admin_guide.pdf:  VMware Update Manager Administration Guide

vi3_35_25_u2_3_server_config.pdf: ESX Server 3 Configuration Guide

vi3_35_25_u2_config_max.pdf:  VMware Infrastructure 3 Configuration Maximum

I believe the above list shall be helpful for anyone preparing for either VMware Enterprise Administration Exam or VMware Design Exam. Though as I mentioned earlier, real production experience is very crucial for doing well in either exam. I have collected the above documents recommendations from scattered places including blogs & VMware community & though I will consolidate them in one list that might be useful for anyone else planning to take these exams.

At least I would like to thanks everyone who shared their VMware Design Exam experience on their blog or on the VMware community forum as that was of a great help to me & hope my post in here will be regarded as a thank you for the community.

I have earlier mentioned on my blog that I will publish my study guide for VMware Enterprise Administration Exam, but as I have been preparing for my design exam & killed with projects at work. I really had no time to put it all online. Further, it seems these exams are expiring soon. For that I have decided to only publish the most ignored chapters required for the VMware Enterprise Administration exam & VMware Design Exam. I will start with NPIV. When I was preparing for my exam beside the Exam blueprint NPIV was not covered in any study guide including the DSA materials. As I did not use it much in real life I had got a bit of exposure and note taken while reading the chapter about it in the Fibre Channel SAN Configuration Guide which should be almost of sufficient knowledge for both VMware Enterprise Administration Exam & VMware Design Exam as I assume at least. Below are my note of NPIV.

NPIV enables a single FC HBA port to register several unique WWNs with the fabric, each of which can be assigned to an individual virtual machine. When a virtual machine has a WWN assigned to it, the virtual machine’s configuration file (.vmx) is updated to include a WWN pair (consisting of a World Wide Port Name, WWPN, and a World Wide Node Name, WWNN).

As that virtual machine is powered on, the VMkernel instantiates a virtual port (VPORT) on the physical HBA which is used to access the LUN. The VPORT is a virtual HBA that appears to the FC fabric as a physical HBA, that is, it has its own unique identifier, the WWN pair that was assigned to the virtual machine. Each VPORT is specific to the virtual machine, and the VPORT is destroyed on the host and it no longer appears to the FC fabric when the virtual machine is powered off.

If NPIV is enabled, four WWN pairs (WWPN & WWNN) are specified for each virtual machine at creation time.When a virtual machine using NPIV is powered on, it uses each of these WWN pairs in sequence to try to discover an access path to the storage. The number of VPORTs that are instantiated equals the number of physical HBAs present on the host up to the maximum of four. A VPORT is created on each physical HBA that a physical path is found on. Each physical path is used to determine the virtual path that will be used to access the LUN.Note that HBAs that are not NPIV aware are skipped in this discovery process because VPORTs cannot be instantiated on them

NOTE: If a user has four physical HBAs as paths to the storage, all physical paths must be zoned to the virtual machine by the SAN administrator. This is required to support multipathing even though only one path at a time will be active.

NOTE: If you want to use VMotion for a virtual machine with enabled NPIV, make sure that the RDM file is located on the same datastore where the virtual machine configuration file resides. You cannot perform Storage VMotion, or VMotion between datastores, when NPIV is enabled.

NOTE: You can enable NPIV for a VM while creating it or after turning it off from virtual machine settings. Hint Hint: a virtual machine need to be turned off to enable NPIV.

Requirements & Limitations for Using NPIV:

Before you attempt to implement NPIV by assigning WWNs to your virtual machines, be aware of the following requirements and limitations:

1. NPIV can only be used for virtual machines with RDM disks. Virtual machines with regular virtual disks use the WWNs of the host’s physical HBAs.
2. For this implementation of NPIV, the physical HBAs on an ESX Server host, using their own WWNs, must have access to all LUNs that are to be accessed by virtual machines running on that host.
3. The ESX Server host’s physical HBAs must support NPIV. Currently, the following vendors and types of HBA provide this support: QLogic – any 4GB HBA & Emulex – 4GB HBAs that have NPIV compatible firmware.
4. Only four WWN pairs are generated per virtual machine.
5. When a virtual machine or template with a WWN assigned to it is cloned, the clones do not retain the WWN.
6. The switches used must be NPIV aware.
7. When configuring an NPIV LUN for access at the storage level, make sure that the NPIV LUN number and NPIV target ID match the physical LUN and Target ID.
8. Always use the VI Client to manipulate virtual machines with WWNs.

Please go over the above post twice, as it seems most of us are not exposed to NPIV as much we should & both VMware Enterprise Administration Exam & VMware Design Exam have listed them as items that can appear on the exam. Please post your comment or extras you want to share about NPIV with us in the comment area below.

I have scheduled my VMware VCDX Enterprise Administration Exam on the 1st of June 2010. I was planning to take 10 days off work before the exam for preparation, but I got stuck at a large project which has minimized my study time including travel to 5 days.

As I am currently based in Kuwait, the closest location I was able to take my exam in June was London. I have scheduled my exam for the 1st of June & booked my ticket for the 26 of May. As I had to travel to Hungary for training right after my exam I needed to obtain Hungary visa before traveling, which I had never obtained till the 31st of may. That has caused me to fly to London on the day of the exam. What made it more fun, I had to run from the airport to the hotel drop my luggage then head directly to the exam center after 8 hours flight. To make my day even better, I was not prepared for a cold rainy weather in london when I arrived, as it was smoking hot in Kuwait & the weather forcast for London did not mention anything about rain storm. By the time I got to the Vue Pearson Center I was as misrable as it can be and my hopes were just dying a bit by bit after 8 hours flight & arriving to the exam fully wet & without sleep.

As soon the exam started, I had a bit of a confused mind of most of the multiple choice questions. It just seemed out of this world to me & with many I thought none of the answers were correct. I have decided just to skip the questions I have a problem with & try to answer the easy ones to rebuild my self steam. I have marked the questions I skipped & after 20 minutes has past I have started to get more focused & the question started to make more sense even the ones I skipped at the first glance.

I have took many other bloggers advice & made sure I had an adequate time for the 11 labs questions. I believe the lab questions are easier than the multiple choice questions or maybe b/c I have just got more focused and relaxed at that time.

Its important to save almost half of your exam time for the labs as mentioned at the beginning of the exam as these are worth 50% of your score. Most blogs I have read before the exam has pointed out that only 40% of your score depend on the labs, but when I arrived to the exam I was surprised it is actually 50% of your exam. I thought this is worth sharing & not against the exam agreement.

To make my exam experience more exciting after all the pre-exam suffering I had to face, few exam takers next to me seemed to take some kind of English exam where they have to type an essay. I was able to hear their too fast  keystrokes one after an other, which was so distracting that I had to put a head set just to reduce the noise. The funny part I found the head set available at the pc & did not have to ask for them so I guess others had faced the same.

Furthermore, there was a serious lag in the labs. Many of the keystrokes were not intercepted & some were intercepted twice, which make me believe the lab setup is actually located across the ocean in states or so on. Maybe you will have a better response if you do it in states or any where else closer to the lab.

As soon I have left the exam, I have to find a cab under the rain showers without umbrella as I was not expecting this kind of weather. I went back to my hotel room & was not very sure about my exam. Though after that I have moved on for my DS8000 workshop course in Hungary & decided just to focus on my training & just wait 10 business days for my exam result. The bad part I had not received my result till today which is about 26 days after the exam (I thought it was suppose to be here in 10-12 business days). The more the exam result delayed, the more it got me frustrated & just want to know the result. For these reasons I have just kept quite about taking the exam for a while. It was not an easy exam by any mean, but quite fair.

I just opened my e-mail today & my e-mail has read something like your score has been attached. It did not say congratulation or anything like that which did not sound good at all. I have oppened the pdf sheet and it said

“Congratulations on passing this exam. Passing this exam is the second of the four parts required to achieve the VMware Certified Design Expert designation. Congratulations on passing this exam. Passing this exam is the second of the four partsrequired to achieve the VMware Certified Design Expert designation.”

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That is when I started jumping around the coffee shop where I have received the e-mail. I am quite happy to be one of the few brave souls that had attempted this exam & passed.  Actually for me it has been even an extra challenge as I had a huge travel & accommodation cost involved with taking the exam, which is unfortunately not sponsored by my company at least so far. Further, the DSA training was not sponsored by my company which lead me to go across the materials on my own.

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Well, sorry to bore you with my exam story though I am sure some of you would care to figure out where I have disappeared for a while. That is exactly where I have disappeared. Studying & doing my VMware Enterprise Administration Exam then DS8000 Training in Hungary.

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I will be posting my exam study notes online later on, so it will help others prepare for the exam. Though my study notes were a mix of the following:

1-  DSA Course material (I was luckily able to find a used one on ebay, as I did not get to attend the course.  Not available in my area any more).

2- VMware Enterprise Administration Exam study guide 3.5 v0.2 by PetervandenBosch found here.

3-  Official VMware Enterprise Administration Exam Blueprint v3.5

4- My 6 Years experience with Virtualization, as I can tell although the above material cover a lot of it. It does not cover 100% of the questions. Many questions are left wild open to your day to day experience.

I believe the DSA course material was of a great help for the exam. If you can put your had on it, then its the place to start.

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Good luck for everyone & I will start posting my VMware Enterprise Administration Study Guide or posts soon. I just have to figure out the best way to put them online, as they are only hand written at the moment.