Recommended Lab Setup

[Moif_Murphy]

Hello,

I've started studying for the VCAP5-DCA (last night in fact) and I've still got my VMware Workstation Lab from the VCP5 study. It's the usual setup: 1 DC, 1 SQL, 1 VC and 2 x ESXi hosts and software iSCSI storage. Does the VCAP5-DCA need anything else other than that? Any funky configurations I should be aware of?

Thanks

[JoshuaAndrewsVM · Accepted solution]

The Blueprint lists all the objectives of the exam, if you have not looked at it.

http://mylearn.vmware.com/register.cfm?course=169245

Make sure you have NFS storage available and VUM, VMA, PowerCLI, and AutoDeploy installed.  You can use any 5.x version to study but the environment is currently 5.0 so no web client.

The exam environment also has Fibre Channel in addition to NFS and iSCSI, if you don't have FCP at least understand any differences to iSCSI (like NPIV).

Make sure you have Enterprise Plus licensing so you have access to all the functions of the product.

[Moif_Murphy]

Perfect, just what I was looking for.

I'm using the Trainsignal course which was released just yesterday and of course the plethora of blogs out there to keep me on my toes.

[aravinds3107]

This should be good to go and you also need to have some hands on vMA and vCLI so if you have these setup as well it should be good.

All the best!!

[firestartah]

Hi,

I would recommend just practicing everything on the blueprint in your lab until you can do it without thinking and via the gui,cli and vMA. If you are interested I did a blog posting around all the resources I used for my DCA http://thesaffageek.co.uk/2012/10/30/my-vcap5-dca-experience/

Good luck

Gregg

[Moif_Murphy]

Thanks chaps.

[AndreTheGiant]

You can expect two ESXi hosts, a vCenter Server, a client station and vMA and/or PowerCLI.

This was my exam experience:http://vinfrastructure.it/2013/03/my-experience-with-vcap5-dca-exam/

Note that was a 5.0 enviroment! And I suppose that it's still 5.0, but check the latest blueprint and the link reference (where you can found the docs version).