VCAP5-DCD Study Guide
Note: As per this note, this exam has been retired
I was studying for the VCAP5-DCD and I found a lot of resources on this topic, so I decided to put my notes down in one area. Most of the information is just blatantly copied from other resources, but again these are just notes and are here for my own reference. Here is a good list of resources that I found:
- VCAP5-DCD Study Guide from Florian Grehl
- Florian Grehl from Germany putting together a study guide for DCD, great notes and illustrations
- APAC vBrownbags
- A list of Brownbags mostly led by Alastair Cooke from the APAC region. Really good stuff and covers most of the material if not all. Sometimes has guests to present networking and storage considerations. There are 15 Sessions in total, I would recommend watching all of them.
- VCAP-DCD 5 Study Notes 3
- Both are written by Iwan Rahabok, he was one of the guests for the APAC Brownbags for security design considerations. The above two links have a lot of good examples of design and architecture
- VCAP5-DCD Study Guide from Nick Marshall
- Produced by Nick Marshall, he is responsible for hosting the APAC BrownBag feeds and was a guest on one of the Brownbags for the design performance considerations. The link has a very good concise descriptions of the objectives and some notes for each
- VCAP-DCD Exam Passed from Will Huber
- A blog written by Will Huber, he mentions his experience when he took the VCAP-DCD and has a 46 page PDF on his notes, but they are hand written, nonetheless really useful notes.
- VCAP-DCD Exam UI Demo
- A sample visio-like question. Good practice to get used to the interface and how the questions are presented.
- VMware vSphere Design Workshop – Day 3
- There is a recommended class for the VCAP-DCD it’s called the VMware Design Workshop. I keep hearing a lot of good things about the class, but I have never actually taken it. The class is a 3 day course and the above 3 links are the experience of Jason Bloche for each day as he attended the class. Jason Bloche also took part in one of the US BrownBags. Really useful information
- VMware vCloud Implementation Example
- Very good examples of vCloud designs, shows how to go from a logical design to a physical designs. Also has great examples of real life requirements, assumptions and constraints Now to the actual Objectives:
Objective 1 – Create a vSphere Conceptual Design
- Objective 1.1 – Gather and analyze business requirements
- Objective 1.2 – Gather and analyze application requirements
- Objective 1.3 – Determine Risks, Constraints, and Assumptions
Objective 2 – Create a vSphere Logical Design from an Existing Conceptual Design
- Objective 2.1 – Map Business Requirements to the Logical Design
- Objective 2.2 – Map Service Dependencies
- Objective 2.3 – Build Availability Requirements into the Logical Design
- Objective 2.4 – Build Manageability Requirements into the Logical Design
- Objective 2.5 – Build Performance Requirements into the Logical Design
- Objective 2.6 – Build Recoverability Requirements into the Logical Design
- Objective 2.7 – Build Security Requirements into the Logical Design
Objective 3 – Create a vSphere Physical Design from an Existing Logical Design
- Objective 3.1 – Transition from a Logical Design to a vSphere 5 Physical Design
- Objective 3.2 – Create a vSphere 5 Physical Network Design from an Existing Logical Design
- Objective 3.3 – Create a vSphere 5 Physical Storage Design from an Existing Logical Design
- Objective 3.4 – Determine Appropriate Compute Resources for a vSphere 5 Physical Design
- Objective 3.5 – Determine Virtual Machine Configuration for a vSphere 5 Physical Design
- Objective 3.6 – Determine Datacenter Management Options for a vSphere 5 Physical Design