VDCA550 vs VDCD550

[RichardBrown]

Hi,

does anyone have an insight into both of these certifications? I will be sitting an one of the exams in Feb to obtain one of the certs but i'm not sure which one to take.... My roles with clients involve both design and administration and so the dilema, is there any reason to take one over the other, are either eaiser..

Thanks

[NealeC · Accepted solution]

Hi Richard,

You need to be asking yourself what you want to demonstrate by achieving the certification. 

The DCA, which I have not sat yet but am booked on in 2 weeks, shows that you have the knowledge and practical experience to be able to resolve active issues on a live vSphere environment.  The exam for DCA involves connecting to a remote vSphere lab and performing tasks to either configure/provision new items or resolve problems with an aspect of a VM/Host/Datastore or any other vSphere component.

DCD, and I have less experience of this exam having not prepped for it yet, demonstrates that you have an understanding of the components which make up a vSphere environment and understand things like constraints, requirements, licensing models etc.  I have been on the vSphere Design Workshop and that has example scenarios where a client may need to run a specific workload.  To provide a vSphere environment to do this could be achieved in multiple ways but if a restriction was licensing or a requirement was a certain level of High Availability then that may dictate whether you opted for many smaller hosts or fewer larger hosts.

As I've not sat either I can't recommend an order to take them in.  As for "easier", I think that's wholly down to the individual.  You may already be a whizz at visio and analysing requirements and be able to decide on DAS over Fibre Channel due to a specific IOPs limit, or perhaps you know esxcli and powercli inside out and can reconfigure a Distributed Virtual Switch entirely via the GUI or Command line to have different uplink NICs. 

If VCDX is your end goal then which you do first isn't really relevant, as you need both. 

The blueprints for each will give you a detailed look at what's expected in terms of experience and knowledge, have a read through each and see which one seems like you already know most of it, then get on google.  There are tons of great resources out there for both.

The vBrownBag podcasts are a great place to start.

Chris

[RichardBrown]

HI Neale,

Thanks for taking the time to reply to my post, your input is useful. If you have the time could you share your experience of the exam with me after you take it in the coming weeks.

Thanks

Rich

[NealeC]

Hi Richard,

I will indeed, both on here and on my blog

http://chrisneale.wordpress.com/

I'm currently studying with the Official Cert Guide hardback book for VCAP-DCA, bought from Amazon. (£28)

The VCAP5-DCD Official Cert Guide (with DVD): VMware Certified Advanced Professional 5- Data Center ...

I have the unofficial Study Guide from Jason Langer and Josh Coen (Free)

http://www.virtuallanger.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/The-Unofficial-Official-VCAP5-DCA-Study-Guid...

Chris Wahl's Study sheet checklist to tick off what I "think" I am confident with (Free)

The VCAP-DCA 5 Study Sheet - Wahl Network

My lab consists of a

• Whitebox PC (i7 4770s, 16Gb Ram, 256Gb SDD, Win7) - (£500 approx)
  running VMWorkstation 10 to run the VMs on which includes DC, VC, VMA, 2xESXi hosts plus some nested "client" VMS running on the virtual ESXi hosts
• Synology DS212j NAS running latest DSM with 2x1Tb HDDs in RAID1 (Equiv DS214se version £120 without drives)
  This provides NFS and iSCSI LUNs to create datastores on for my hosts

Forums, lots and lots of people's VCAP Blueprint/Study Guide Blogs and as much practice as I can cram in.

Regards

Chris