DavePayne.com

I was chatting with my buddy Jeremy Pries ( http://www.jeremypries.com/ ) a couple weeks ago and he told me he was studying for the VCP 4 test.  He reminded me that in order to upgrade the cert from VCP 3 to 4, you had to take the test, and pass it, by the end of December 2009.  Zoiks!  I completely spaced that one.  Problem is, if you take and pass the VCP 410 exam by the deadline, you have to take VMware's weeklong training class, again, which will sink another $3000-4000 plus a week off of productive activity.

((UPDATE:  VMware extended the deadline to Jan 31, 2010 "due to overwhelming demand".  I'm glad I didn't know that or I would have procrastinated this another month!!))

So I went and registered for the test.  This was about Tues Dec 15th.  There was maybe 2 seats left at the Pearson VUE certified testing centers in the Twin Cities, and I'd have to take the test the next day.  No go.  I've got a deep VMware background, having worked extensively with the products from ESX 1.5 to 4 since 2003, but I needed some prep time to cover the gambit on vSphere before I thought I'd be ready for this test.

2nd caveat is that VMware was offering a voucher for a free retake of the test if you took it before Dec 22nd.  You could then retake the test again for free (the first round is about $200) before the end of Dec 2009.  So I looked at the available options for testing centers on or before 12/22/09.  Twin Cities, booked.  Immediate cities in the outer ring of the metro, booked.  So I was looking at Brainerd, Alexandria or a trip to Wisconsin.  Since I live on the NW corner of the metro, I picked Alexandria, who had an opening at their tech school on none other than 12/22.  Well I had some personal business to take care of in Alexandria anyway coming up, so I booked that.  Now if I failed the test, I'd have to rebook by the end of the year, which would mean I'd have to find a testing center not already full by the rest of the procrastinators in the midwest.  So I'd be looking at upper Saskatchewan or thereabouts.  I haven't failed a certification test yet, so the better strategy was to pass.

Enter cram time.  I needed to get up to speed on all the little nuances of vSphere, especially all the features hidden in corners that I probably haven't run into in the field yet, but that the crafty exam writers would try to stick me on.  So I did some updating of the lab at my home office, scraped together the systems I had lying around and borrowed a server from my buddy Ryan Grendahl (thanks a ton Ryan) for running ESX 4.0 (you need 64 bit procs, and all I had laying around didn't cut muster).  Here's a quick view of the makeshift lab assembled for cram time:

Now that I'm working from the home office as my primary jump off point, I'm putting a lot more effort into the home lab.  I'll be moving most of this equipment into a dark & cool hole in the basement where I can dedicate a circuit to it and not have the airplane equivalent noise level in my office.

On with the story.  So I got the lab assembled, and worked through most of the install/upgrade portions of test prep as I did that.  ESX 4 is actually a supported guest OS on VMware Workstation 7 and Fusion now.  So I popped up a couple ESX hosts in VMs on my Macbook Pro just for testing the install portions.

I still needed a SAN however for testing VMotion, DRS, HA and the other advanced features of vSphere.  Coincidentally, I had a meeting with a gentlemen named Mike Stolz, VP Sales & Marketing for Stormagic later that week.  It was an introductory meeting for me to get familiar with what they are up to.  Stormagic makes iSCSI SAN software.  They've actually got a long history in the storage business, having gone through many years of evolution with different companies and products over the years.  As Mike tells it, their engineering team was part of the early founders of iSCSI technology.  They've ended up at Stormagic now, who is a startup storage software company.  They've found a niche in the virtualization market working with VMware.  VMware is becoming very attractive to the SMB space as they have conquered entry into the enterprise already.  But the enterprise price points have been too rich for SMB blood, which has created opportunity for competition to set in.  VMware has responded with free versions of software and lower priced packages.  As a complement to that strategy, Stormagic has released SvSAN, a Storage Virtual Appliance.  And it's FREE.  Of course you can pay your thousand bucks or so for an HA feature set, but the base product is free, and always will be, no catches.  It lets you take any storage you can present to a VM via ESX and turn it into an iSCSI storage array.  Full functionality for VMotion etc comes with it. Very cool.  And very handy for my lab.  I came home, downloaded the bits, and had a SAN running in about an hour.  Hats off to Stormagic for making a nice EZ button.

Righto, back off the tangent.  So I got to work on studying, which is a not so excited process of pushing every button in the software, pouring through user guides, and reviewing materials that fellow students have prepared.  I'll keep the suspense to this not so interesting story to a minimum.  I got through the exam in Alexandria this week.  I took the test and scored a 350.  I think the most is 500 and the fail mark is 300.  So I squeaked by.  It wasn't too bad of a test, but there were plenty of questions that came out of nowhere.  The process of elimination serves you well with these types of multiple choice tests.  85 questions, 90 minutes.

Here's proof that I'm a VCP 4.  Don't mind the mugshot on the paper.  The lady doing the admin part of the test was giving me all sorts of librarian rigidness about multiple forms of ID and proof that I'm not a terrorist or criminal etc.  Then she wants my picture, so I gave her the "I'm only here because I have to be here" look.

A huge thanks to Simon Long for his blog.  A ton of great material there and a really nice layout that links to the available resources that correspond to the Exam Blueprint.  This is a one stop site for digging in and prepping for the test, or just learning everything you need to know about vSphere in general.

Also, the nameless person that administers vcp410.com, many thanks to you as well.  The day before the exam I perused through his site.  He's got a culmination of questions that could show up on the test that you can use for last minute cramming.  That was helpful as well.

Anyway, VCP 4 is done.  I didn't ace it, but passed nonetheless.  VMware is currently releasing much more difficult certification tracks such as the VMware Design Exam and VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX3).  Jeremy and I were talking about this and decided it's probably best to wait till they have updated the VDCX to v4 before taking it.  No use in going through the effort for ESX3 now that vSphere is where it's at.

If you haven't taken the test yet, good luck, and send Simon Long a few $$ for his hard work in putting together a super nice resource for the community.

Good Luck!