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]

Shady the study group your in, are you guys just PM'ing each other on twitter or using a #

@burdweiser

Yeah its a real a really hard exam, its meant to be, however when that pass does come it will just be that much more rewarding.  However I'll continue to do my best to keep building out study materials as I feel the biggest problem on this exam is its conceptual which makes it so open.  This makes it really hard to study for or to go back and correct your mistakes.  I don't feel to bad about it as almost everyone I talked to at VMware world said it took them 2-4 tries to get past this one.  Hopefully with the site and the community we can drop these numbers a little   If anything the people who have achieved the DCD have a great deal of drive behind them!

You wrote the 5.5 exam last time right burdweiser?  Did you find it better then the 5.1 exam?

[yadavrajiv]

I am interested in joining the study group, i also missed  VCAP-DCD exam by a small margin.

[burdweiser]

Yes. I wrote about my experience here: http://vexpert.me/pm

I used some resources from Marc Crawford: http://blog.marccrawford.com/vcap-dcd-study-resources/ and the Google+ group: https://plus.googleapis.com/wm/4/communities/103910393937429082483

[Wardy8124]

If anyone is interested myself and JPM300 are going to join forces and form a study group. I am looking to do this via Google+ in order that we can live communicate and help each other with designs and scenarios similar to that of what is expect of the exams. The intention is to get us over that 300 pass mark for next attempts in the coming weeks. PM if you want to join in and I'll give you the details. Good luck to all those taking the exam soon.

[ShadyMalatawey]

Dear all,

Join us on VCAP-DCD: VCAP-DCD Study Group - Community - Google+ (The same one shared by Burdweiser)

Administrator: Melissa P
We hash-tag each other using #VCAPDCD. we also can PM each other .
For any assistant: follow me on @ShadyMalatawey or hit me on hangouts

[burdweiser]

At VMworld 2014 I had a problem with my exam crashing a lot. I worked something out with the VMware proctor to get a delayed grade based on him manually scoring my master design question. I finally got the results back today and it was another fail. This was my 5th (yes 5 times) attempt at the exam. Two of those were because of no shows due to travel. I really don't know where things are going wrong. Either I'm way off on how to use the design tool or I'm just not smart enough for this exam. It is not just about studying, I work with this stuff every day. No one can pass a VMware exam by reading alone. I am an architect and I design enterprise environments all the time. I know all about interviewing to design out environments and to design around interdependencies.  I've been working with VMware products since the beginning. I've even built virtual infrastructures that run the ISS at NASA today.

I think that some of the scenarios are just way open to interpretation.

VCAP-DCD would be a nice title to have, but I do not think there will be a 6th attempt for me. Maybe in vSphere 6 if things change with the exam. I'm not saying it should be easier, the exam should be a little more clear on what is being asked. Plus, I never thought it was very realistic to chew through that much mixed material in 10 minutes and spit out something perfect in a design. I'm not sure how current VCAP-DCD have done it, but hats off to you! For what its worth, I will still be contributing the community.

[JPM300]

Sorry to hear about the results

I've been working with a bunch of the people in the community and on the google+ study around  and will hopefully have some more practice questions for everyone soon.  One of the things I want to work on next is the Dependencies downstream/up stream stuff.  After re-reading this I'm almost 100% sure I did this wrong :smileysilly:

Anyhow I know its not that you are not smart enough, this exam has a tremendous amount of material to get through in 4 hours, and when rushing designs mistakes will always be made.  Even in my last write, after I had one design 90% done I realized I could of done it slightly different or a better way but I felt I didn't have enough time to waste to start it over.  I would focus on the question you felt shaky on in the test and find the answers your looking for around those instead of reading the conceptual study material again.  If there is anything the community can do, let us know.

[JPM300]

I wanted to post this really quickly as it will be the next design question on the simulator once I get around to creating it.  With that said here it is:

The decencies portion of the blue print is very simple and I don't think most people take a long glance at it.  I know I didn't.  However after talking to some of the people in the community I am almost certain that I did a question wrong on the exam due to not looking at this item more closely.  So the blue print states the following: Given a scenario, identify logical components that have dependencies on certain services and we typically see a diagram something to this effect:

Website ------> Web Server -----> Database -----> VMware Cluster

Now the concept of downstream / upstream is loosely mentioned throughout the documentation, however if you acutely do some digging, there is mixed views on this topic and it's never 100% clear.  The following blog has a really good write up on this:

Application Dependency – Upstream and Downstream Definitions | vBikerblog

The main picture I want to focus on is this:

As you can see what some people may think is upstream/downstream is not really what VMware or the exam is possibly after.  So after doing a tremendous amount of digging I have come to this conclusion:

VMware deems downstream as anything that can effect downtime.  For instance in the picture above if MySQL fails EVERYTHING will go down.  However if www.vbikerblog.com goes down, only the website is down while the rest of the infrastructure is ok.  This would make www.vbikerblog.com the highest part on the upstream.  Working from the ground up (MySQL) is working up stream.

A good analogy of this would be a house where the foundation is your downstream, your walls and pillars are up stream and your roof would be the highest point on the upstream.  If the roof blows off everything else blow is okay, however if the foundation falls then EVERYTHING is down.

Now lets look at some common examples or this:

Now in the top example the VMware Cluster is downstream, while everything else is upstream.  Which means if the website goes down only that is effected.  However if the Database or VMware Cluster was to go down, everything Upstream of it will fail as they are dependent on their downstream counter parts.

In the second exam on the bottom I have taken the previous example/picture from vbikerblog's pic and just turned it sideways.  Now the VMware Cluster is the Downstream with everything being an Upstream.  Again  you can see the dependencies on their downstream counterparts.  In this example if the MySQL servers where to fail everything else upstream(Tomcat servers, Apache servers, and web servers) would loose functionality and not be able to serve the website.  Another thing the second picture does is not only does it show the decencies it can help spot single points of failure.

Now not everyone may agree with this view point, but from all the reading I have done it seems this is the viewpoint in which VMware is taking and thus should be studied as such.

If anyone has any other comments on it, please let me know.  I hope this has helped and look forwards to another design question in the near future.

[Wardy8124]

As always good work Jason, one thing I will add to help here is that someone told me a good way of thinking about this and this is to think of the way the arrows point. What I mean is that the source of the arrow is the component dependant on where the arrow points to. So in this case www.vbikerblog.com depends on Apache and therefore the source is vBikerblog and therefore the arrow needs to start from here and point to the Apache server. I felt that the instruction in relation to exam question for this could be a little clearer here and so if VMware certification guys are reading then please can this be modified accordingly

[ikiris]

290 seems to be a magic fail number. My first attempt was a 290 as well. yoping to step it up for my second attempt on the 3rd but I lost a lot of steam. Thanks for all of your work on the dimulator, it will certainly be part of my review.

[vervoortjurgen]

hello all

today i took the DCD 550 exam. unfortunately i failed it. i only had a 206 and needed 300

i have to say i took the DCD510 first(286 of 300) and was lil surprised how the DCD 550 was changed

i studied with the pearson book VCAP5-DCD but honeslty say that book sucks for the 550 exam.

waist of money if you ask me.

so im going to dig in again in the blueprint and blogs.

if anyone has any sugestions always welcome

good luck all

[firestartah]

Sorry to hear about your result. For the exam I would recommend the VMware vSphere Design (2nd Edition) book and Mastering VMware vSphere 5.5 book.

Gregg

[JPM300]

Yeah its hard to read over all of the same material for a 3rd time.  I would recommend touching base with the community or searching out answers to stuff you felt you where shaky on.  Reading the conceptual stuff in the blue print for a second time I found didn't really help all that much as you continue to understand it the same way as you read it the first time or second time.  Reach out to the google+ community and others to bounce idea's off, I have found it extremely useful.  Also I will be creating more practice questions for the simulator soon.  I have a bunch of questions mocked out but just haven't had time to get them created/posted.  So stay tuned!

Good luck! and keep at it!

[JPM300]

Hey vervoort,

I would suggestion getting in on the google+ group that Shady posted earlier in the thread.  The group is very good at communicating with each other and helping with study material.  It's also always better to bounce idea's off another person.  Two minds are always better then one.  Many times you see something in a particular way, but once someone else shares their view point on it, it opens you up to the idea and can redefine the way you saw a design or best practice.  A good example of this was the upstream/downstream post I made the other day.  I'm almost positive I got that wrong on my exam just due to what I considered upstream /downstream :smileysilly:

Anyhow I hope this has helped.  Stick in there and best of luck on your next write!

Stay tuned on this post and the simulator as I will be building new material in the next little while prior to my 3rd attempt.

[vervoortjurgen]

hey JPM300

thx, i was planning to join the google+ community anyway

hope this will help

need to wait 14 days now until next exam shedule

but i have 2 migrations to do anyway so maybe it will be an christmas present to get my VCAP-DCD

ill follow your post if your working an a simulator

i need to recertify but vsphere 6 is coming out since im in the beta group so i hope its not a waist

greets all

[JPM300]

Hey everyone, haven't made an update for awhile, sorry things have been a little hectic

There was a breif update the other day as my last update knocked out 2 questions out of the simulator due to a page renumber issue(whoops :smileysilly:)

So those are back online.

I'm currently working on a dependency or dependencies question(s).  I also have a list of things I would like to re-visit for study material, but just waiting on getting some information back.

Sorry for the slow updates recently.  Hopefully will have some new stuff soon.

[JPM300]

Wrote the 5.5 for the first time the other day and finally passed this exam ! (3 attempts total, 2 on 5.1, 1 on 5.5)

With the DCD finally out of the way I can focus on my DCX and getting more material into the simulator.  I am also trying to build a DCD study workshop, so hopefully will have more time to finish that up now and get it out

Look forward to getting some updates done

[vfk]

Congratulations Jason, well done, looking forward the detailed feedback ... very unlike to just write couple lines.

[JPM300]

yeah sorry I have some deadlines at work that I have to finish, and I drove 4 hours to the testing center, wrote the exam, then drove 4 hours back home :smileysilly:  So haven't had time yet.  I will write a more detailed response over lunch :smileysilly:

[ShadyMalatawey]

Glad you did it at last, bro :smileygrin:
Waiting for your experience  thoughts
And man.. just reply on your Hangouts :smileysilly: