VMdamentals.com

Posts Tagged ‘VCDX’

Last week I was in London to complete the VCDX Design beta exam. This long awaited exam consists of a load of questions to be completed in four hours. In this blog post I will give my opinion on this exam. Because the contents of the exam should not be shared with others, I will not be giving any hints and tips on how to maximize your score if you participate, but I will address the kind of questions and my expectations in this blog post.

First off, there was way to little time to complete the exam. I have been trying to type comments on some questions with obvious errors or questions where I suspected something wasn’t quite right. All questions require some reading, so I could nicely time if I needed to speed up or down. Unfortunately, somewhere near question 100, I stumbled upon a question with pages worth of reading! So I had to “hurry” that one, and as a result, the rest as well. Shame. Also, VMware misses out vital information this way because people just don’t have the time to comment.

As I have noticed with other VMware exams, the scenarios are never anywhere near realism (at least not for European standards). Also having questions about for example the bandwidth of a T1 line is not very bright, given the fact that the exam is to be held worldwide. In Europe, we have no clue on what a T1 line is.

But the REAL problem with this design exam is, that in my opinion, this is NO design exam at all. Sorry VMware, I was very disappointed. If this were a real design exam, I would actually encourage people to bring all PDFs and books they can find; it would (should!) not help you. Questions like “how to change a defective HBA inside an ESX node without downtime” ? Sorry, nice for the enterprise exam, but it has absolutely nothing to do with designing. Offload that kind of stuff to the enterprise exam please! And if you have to ask about things like this, then ask about how to go about the rezoning of the fiber switches. That would at least prove of some understanding how you design a FC network. But that question was lacking.

There are numerous other examples of this, all about just knowing that little tiny detail to get you a passing score. That is not designing! I had been hoping for questions like how many spindles to design under VMware and why. When to use SATA and when not to. Customers having blades with only two uplinks. Things that actually happen in reality, things that bring out the designer in you (or should bring out the designer in you)! Designing is not knowing about what action will force you to shut a VM and which action will not. <Sigh>.

I know, the answers could not be A, B, C or D. This exam should have open questions. More work for VMware, but hey, that is life. Have people pick up their pen and write it down! Give them space for creativity, avoiding the pitfalls that were sneaked into the scenario. These things are what should be a quality of a designer anyway. That’s the way to get it tested.

I’ll just keep hoping the final part of the VCDX certification (defending a design for a panel) will finally bring that out. If it doesn’t, we’ll end up with just another “VCP++” exam, for which everyone can get a passing score if you study for a day or two. I hope VCDX will not become “that kind of a certification”!

I hope VMware will look at comments like these in a positive manner, and create an exam which can actually be called a DESIGN exam. VMware, Please PLEASE put all the little knowledge tidbits into the Enterprise exam, and create a design exam that actually forces people to DESIGN! Until that time, I’ll be hoping the final stage of VCDX will give back my hopes that this certification will really make a difference.