Virtual Lifestyle

VMware VCDX Design Exam Preparation Resources

Feb 22, 2010 Blogs

I’ve been preparing for the Design exam portion of VCDX for the last couple of days. Tomorrow is D-day for me! Meanwhile, some tweeps asked my what materials I used to prepare. Well, here you go:

Obviously, use the VMware VCDX Community Documents and the VCDX Design Exam Blueprint. I’ve read ‘Mastering vSphere 4′ by Scott Lowe, which is a nice addition on some of the details on vSphere. Only read if you’ve got the time, it weighs in at a hefty 700 pages.

The absolutely most valuable resources for me were:

• VMware Technical Paper - Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
  • I highly recommend this VMbook!
• VMware Infrastructure 3 in a Cisco Network Environment
• iSCSI Design Considerations and Deployment Guide
• VMware VI3 Security Hardening
• Chad Sakacc - A “Multivendor Post” on using iSCSI with VMware vSphere
• Duncan Epping - HA Deepdive

Also, these were nice to read:

• Duncan Epping - Impact of decisions…
• Frank Denneman - Impact of Host local VM Swap on HA and DRS

The usual linkage on the blogs show some other useful documents, too:

• Scott Lowe - VCDX Design Exam Post-Mortem
• Jason Boche - VCDX Design Exam: been there, done that!
• Rick Scherer - VCDX Design Exam – Complete
• John Arrasjid - VCDX Tips from VCDX 001 John Arrasjid

As I’m a bit rusty on iSCSI, I’ve read up on those as well. Remember that the VCDX Design exam is on VI3.5, not vSphere, so these might not apply!

• iSCSI Design Considerations and Deployment Guide
• NetApp and VMware vSphere Storage Best Practices
• VMware vSphere and ESX 3.5 Multiprotocol Performance Comparison Using FC, iSCSI, and NFS
• Best Practices for File System Alignment in Virtual Environments

Specifically, I was also interested in the way Dell/EQL handles iSCSI

• Dell VMware vSphere Reference Architecture for SMB
• Dell EQL – Configuring VMware vSphere swiSCSI with PS-Series storage
• Jon Owings / 2vcps and a Truck – iSCSI Connections on EqualLogic PS Series