Help Create Some New DCD Study material / New Material

[JPM300]

Hello all,

So after just missing my first attempt at my DCD I figured I would take what I learned from that experience and help build some new practice material for those who are attempting the VCAP-DCD5.1/5.5 exam.  During my studies I found a lot of good material out there around the items on the blue print but didn't find a lot of material to help me get into the mind set / exam mode per say.  A good example of this is Joshua's Test Track for the DCA.  He has created some really good practice questions with a lab to boot to really get you in the right mind set for the DCA.  What I would like to do is build something simular for the DCD.

With that in mind, here is the project:

I would like to build a interactive webpage that will simulate what the design questions and drag-n-drop questions are like on the exam with some practice questions created by myself and other people of the community.  How I'm going to try and make it, I'm going to try and use jsPlumb or maybe other simular drag-n-drop java libraries with html 5 to help create an enviroment.  Here is a link to the jsPlumb so you can kind of get an idea of how it will work:

Demo

jsPlumb 1.6.4 demo - home (Vanilla)

Other Java libraries to try

http://www.codecademy.com/forum_questions/51aea0670b92bcd46d000667

This is what it will look like:

Once the frame work is in place we can create test questions and have an interactive testing system to also help grade peoples awnsers to help prep people for the DCD exam prior to writing.

Milstones of the project:

1.)  Create Photoshop and site layout - I have already completed this and continueing to work on it to get more scenario's, I will post the photoshop .psd shortly incase anyone wants to use them to create there own for the time being

2.)  Collect Good test questions with photoshop with an awnser page for the time being until the javascript is written -  this partialy done.  I currently only have two questions created

3.)  Put it all together and post it.  I'm in the process of registering a blog so once I get that done and everything is together I can post the interactive page there and link it in the forums

4.)  Shed less tears over failed DCD attempts

Here are the first two questions I have created:

DCD-Design-Q1

DCD-Drag-n-Drop-Q1

DCD-Q1-A1 - One possible design choice to suit all the requirements, there is many others.  I will also build on this design and put a section for NIOC for those who want to add in 10GB NICS

Now for a quick explanation to my awnser to the design.  For this one I put in an additional 2xQuad Port nics in the available PCI slots.  This allows for 2 nics for mgmt, 2nics for iSCSI, 2nics for backup, 2 nics for FT, 2 nics for DMZ for isolation, and 4 nics for the VMware Network as one of the requirement was it needed 2.43Mbps throughput.  Since you never truely get 100% on network transfer speeds I typically build out to 80%, which is 800Mbps for a 1GB nic.  So to meet the 2.43Mbps you would need a minium of 3 1GB NIC's, however this leaves a single point of failure as if one nic fails the VM Network can only push 2Mbps of traffic till that NIC is back online.  Thus I bumped the VMnetwork to 4 1GB NIC's so there was no single pont of failure.  If anyone else has better ways or other ways please feel free to post on it or work through the question.

DCD-Drag-n-Drop-Q1-A1

A quick Explantion of the design layout

Special thanks to lbourque for running this past the VMware Certification team so fast and getting the green light

If anyone wants to create some questions please post them here as I've told lbourque I'd post them here so they can be looked over incase there is any issues with them.

Current questinos / designs i'm working on:

vApp desing question

Storage design question

Calculation questions IE. what is the min amount of hosts you need to run X number of servers with X cpu, X memory, X networking

Multiple choice questions to hammer on the blue print topics like RPO, RTO, ect.

Thanks again, and I hope to get enough free time in the next few weeks to make some good progress on this.

Also please excuse any spelling mistakes / type-o's, I put this together pretty quickly and haven't had a great deal of time to look it over :smileysilly:

Cheers everyone and good luck!

[JPM300]

Congrats!! that's great news! Remember to share your experience and any tips that you found may have helped

[sclarkenetcraft]

This creature: Anjani_Kumar

has decided to copy/paste Jason's work http://virtualtiers.net/

into his own site with no recognition for the works:

http://www.vmwareminds.com/simulators/vcenter-design-simulator/

[JPM300]

Yes, it would appear it is a direct copy as if you inspect the elements on the site you find this all over the code:

(Mirrored from www.virtualtiers.net by HTTrack Website copier/3.x)

I have reached out to this person to see what the reasoning behind this is but unforantly have not heard anything as of yet? As the simulator and works at www.virtualtiers.net is the combination of efforts from the people of the community, VMware, and myself.  I have no issues with sharing this tool to help as many people as possible in achieving their DCD status, however the proper status and recognition to the people who have helped make this possible would be greatly appreciated when linking to the site.

I'm hoping this will get resolved soon.  I am also in the works of creating more of a front end to the website www.virtualtiers.net and a re-write to re-orient the simulator towards the 5.5 exam as the 5.1 is now retired.

[Anjani_Kumar]

Thanks to bring this in notice.

i want to request a apology on behalf of my team. This website is a part of team work and it is taken care by multiple techies . Not sure why this material is posted through this website. I  instructed them already to not to share anything from the others work. I removed all the content and now its not any more in the website.

Thanks Again.

[JPM300]

Hey Anjani,

Thanks for the update.  I had a feeling it may of been posted with good intentions.

I have no issues with sharing the site or having it linked in as other people have linked to the simulator in their blogs before as long as there is some precursor to the people who have made it possible.  A good example is Shady's blog:

https://virtualpharaohs.com/vcap-dcd-study-group-and-exam-simulator/

The simulator is a combination of work from people in the community, VMware for proofing the questions prior to posting, Paul Kesson, Shady, and myself.

If you ever want to get in touch with me or help, feel free to catch me on here or the DCD group.

Thanks again.

[JPM300]

Although changes are slowly in the works, figured I would bump this for new people writing there DCD.  Hoping to have a revised 5.5 exam soon with some new practice questions.  The old exam will still be available as well. 

[JPM300]

Small update,

DCDStudy pack has been updated with more pieces of the table of contents has been filled out in the body with assistance from other members of the community.

www.virtualtiers.net/EndPage.html

Enjoy!

Sorry that updates are slow as of recent.  The VCDX process and starting a new job has been taking its toll on my time.  The VCDX process is much more exhausting then I ever thought it would be. I look forward to getting back to things once things settle a bit.

Cheers

[rdelaflorvalls]

Hi all! Great work on this forum but I see it is not alive anymore, no post in 2 years.

I wonder if I am in the wrong one for preparing dor the 6 version exam...

I just started playing with virtualtiers today.

I wonder if this would be a good design for first exercise.

I wonder why everybody was using 4 hbas, as with 2 single hbas we don´t have single point of failure.

Also I usually would connect LUNS to bots SPs but I have seen everybody choosing one or other and I assumed this is the way to go.

Any comments aare welcome.

Thanks again for this great job!!!