I’ve been on VCAP6.5-DCV Design in end of April and I passed. The exam wasn’t easy. First of all, the best practices, white papers, books and other documents that I’d to go thru to be successful is tremendous. While, I’ve used many of those in my daily job, one way or another, it would take far longer to prepare If haven’t read any of them. Therefore, plan ahead and make sure you would have enough time to prepare, especially if you have no experience in architecture at all. Personally, the time took me to prepare was more than I anticipated.
Exam Interface
Exam interface and format has been completely re-done, and there aren’t any Visio-like questions. The feeling I’ve got was that I’m on VCP6.5 exam rather then VCAP6.5-DCV. Also, there is an option to mark questions for review of you would like to revise them in the end.
Questions
Questions are better defined and not that vague, which mean that you will definitely get what has been asked and what is the right answer. The format used in the exam is “multiple choice” and “drag and drop questions”, but a vast majority is multiple choice questions.
Comparison to the old versions of the DCV-Design exam
By far, VCAP6.5-DCV is the most refined and understandable exam of all previous design version I’ve sat on. In my opinion, there is plenty of time go over the questions, even if you mark some of them for later review.
Preparation
It’s important to differentiate having experience as an Architect and just want to validate your knowledge, or you decide it’s time to do next step in your career. The reason behind this is simple; Being an engineer you might find yourself lacking certain skills or rather find it difficult working with design methodology used in the exam. However, bellow I’d try to summarize what I have read to prepare for the exam, even those I already knew but decided to refresh my memory.
Note: Some of the resources can be quite old, nevertheless design methodology is same and mostly relevant.
Must Read
- Exam Preparation Guide
- vBrownBag VCAP-DCV Series
- VCAP-DCD 5.5 Certification Guide
- Designing VMware Infrastructure
- VMware vSphere Design
- vSphere 6.5 What’s New
- VMware Validated Design 4.x
Network
- Network Virtualization Design Guide
- Understand how shares in Network I/O Control version 2 work
- vSphere 6.5 Network best practices
Storage
- Virtual Volumes Technical Deep Dive
- vSAN storage hub
- vSphere Storage
- vSphere 6.5 Storage Best Practices
- Virtual Machine Encryption Performance
- VMware vSphere Metro Storage Cluster
Performance Best Practices
- Best Practices for Performance Tuning of Latency-Sensitive Workloads in vSphere VMs
- Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 6.5
- VMware Virtual SAN Performance with Microsoft SQL Server
- Virtual Machine vCPU and vNUMA Rightsizing
Availability Guides
- vSphere Availability
- VMware vSphere 6 Fault Tolerance
- Microsoft Windows Server Failover Clustering on VMware vSphere 6.x
Recoverability Guides
Business Critical Applications
- Business Critical Applications on vSphere
- Virtualizing Business Critical Applications
- Oracle and MSSQL on vSAN Reference Architecture
- SAP Solutions on VMware Best Practices Guide
- VMware vSAN SAP Applications
- SAP and VMware Virtualization
- Microsoft Exchange Server on VMware vSphere Best Practices Guide
Practice Exams
Additional Reading
- Configuration Maximums
- vSAN Use Cases
- VMware TCO Comparison Calculator
- Efficiently Synchronize, Import and Export Content in VMware vSphere Content Library
- vSphere Content Library: distribute your content effortlessly
- Understand Application upstream and downstream dependencies
- Understanding Resource Pools in VMware vSphere
- Virtual Machine vCPU and vNUMA rightsizing – Rules of Thumb
- NUMA Deep Dive
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