Environment size?

[Revan5236]

While reading over the posts, failed and passing.  I haven't noticed anyone really saying what size environment they currently work with.  When I took my VCP, most of the people in the class were managing environments with less than 10 hosts.  I currently manage an environment of over 100 hosts in 5 data centers.

What I'm wondering is from the people that failed and passed, what size environments are you managing?  I'm planning to take both VCAPs before the end of the year and just wanted to try to put some correlation to environment sizes and thoughts on the tests.

Thanks,

Michael

[wjlorenzo]

I just passed the DCA and I run a small/medium environment of 33 hosts with 7 DataCenters in 4 separate vCenters. Nothing too crazy what-so-ever but more than enough to help fully understand the DCA. The DCD is a whole different deal for me as I don't get to do a lot of architecture yet but I would love to in the future.

[vfk]

You don't need a big lab to practise the topic in the blueprint; you are currently managing a reasonably large environment so you should have a good foundation.  You could cover everything in the blueprint for 2-3 esxi host and couple vms.

vfk

[ikiris]

For the VCP, I don't think the size of your environment gives you the requisite information to pass the exam, even MORE so if you have a large environment.

I manage a large environment (600+ hosts, 10+ vcenters dispersed globally) and we are very standardized on our host and storage. The issues that my colleagues and I had on the VCP were around items we don't deal with day-to-day such as iscsi (we are a large NFS shop with some FC).

For the VCAP-DCA, the size of the environment helped since I ran into enough variation in VM requirements that required me to look at different DRS settings, network settings, HA settings, etc. That information got me to pass (though barely). Large environments are dual-edged, the larger they are the more some configs become cookie-cutter and you do not run into some of the config items that you will be tested on. Also a larger environment you may not do host configuration in your day-to-day and may focus on some of the tools in the suite such as vCOPS or VCM. The advantages include having enough customers with variation in requests to push the environment out of the cookie-cutter, but I could see this only happening once in a while.

[CJK4428]

I have around 8,000-10,000 hosts and over 50,000VMs. I will be attempting my first VCAP in august.

[AndreTheGiant]

Good luck

[AndreTheGiant]

About the environment size, for DCA really does not matter. For DCA only the practical experience is relevant and it's also fine in only a lab.

For DCD is quite different... but DCD is not only technical related.