VCP

Breaking the Duck

Richard Green on

It’s been over 18 months since I last sat an IT Pro exam of some description and frankly that was far, far too long. I should really have taken my TOGAF 9 exams last year as a minimum as the Architecting the Enterprise course I attended in London in May included the vouchers for the combined TOGAF exam, but it just never happened.

Today though, I finally broke the duck on my exam sitting and took my VMware Certified Professional 5 Datacenter Virtualization (VCP5-DV) exam and passed it. Maximum score for the exam is 500 and the minimum passing score is 300. I scored 380 which works out to be just shy of 80%. I wasn’t thrilled with the result, but I was happy to pass it first time round.

I got lots of questions on VMware FT which is probably my weakest area of the product after spending a lot of time researching iSCSI and NFS to square up on my existing Fibre Channel knowledge to cover all the storage topics. Although I’ve now passed the exam, I’m going to continue my research to try and brush up more of Fault Tolerance.

Next up? Well, my Cisco CCENT qualification expires in April this year, so I’ve got three months to pass my ICND2 exam to gain my CCNA or I lose the earlier CCENT and have to sit both exams again. Luckily, my networking knowledge has grown a lot since the first time I sat ICND2 and failed it about two and a half years ago, so I’m confident with some new research and studying into serial connections, IPv6 and a few other bits, I will be able to pass that exam.

Onwards and upwards…..

VMware vSphere 4.1 and VCP Web Links

Richard Green on

Having just finished the course for vSphere 4.1 today, it’s going to be all hands on deck revising this stuff for VCP for the next week or so. Here is a list of useful links for vShpere and ESX/ESXi related knowledge which will liekyl help others along with myself in my quest to obtain VCP.

http://vmetc.com/2008/02/12/best-practices-for-esx-host-partitions/

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r40/vsp_40_config_max.pdf

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/virtualization-pro/choosing-a-block-size-when-creating-vmfs-datastores/

http://vmware-land.com/esxcfg-help.html

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsp40/wwhelp/wwhimpl/js/html/wwhelp.htm#href=install/c_vc_hw.html

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsp_vum_40_admin_guide.pdf

I will be updating this list on an on-going basis with all of the resources I come across.

Lastly, I cannot and will not vouch for any of these sites. These are merely just sites I have found to be useful for me.

A Busy Week at Home and Work

Richard Green on

As the title suggests, its a busy week this week all round. On Monday, I started the five day journey on the road to VCP while I attend the VMware vSphere 4.1 course with Gloval Knowledge, and with VMware currently running their own version of Microsoft Second Shot, hopefully I can have a chance if sitting the exam soon.

The wife, Nicky, Sat her final exam for her foundation course, Access to Higher Education for Midwifery, which means she now has the nervous wait to find out her final graded.

Me personally, I went to the doctors yesterday about my ongoing knee problems post-running and have now been referred to a physiotherapist for possible treatment.

As I write all this from my Windows Phone WordPress application, sitting in the car while Nicky runs into Tesco, we are about to go out for dinner with the girls to celebrate Layla’s birthday with another family, Gary and Amy and Joe’s birthday too.