Towards the end of 2013 I thought I might as well try get this exam behind me before kid v2 came along. Even after doing the old trick of booking the exam to force yourself to study, I didn’t know if I had studied enough and enough of the correct material. If you read the blueprint you will see what a mean, it’s kind of vague.
So first thing I did first was attend the vSphere Design Workshop. This is not like any other course I have been on, there is a class guide but its more a series of discussion topics, so that’s mainly all we did… talk.. and come up with different ideas, try justify them and see if they suit the scenario at hand. If you have the opportunity to attend this course do it. It will make you think differently if your day to day job is mainly administration.
Next was to read the blueprint and white-papers mentioned within it. Some are also case studies and this is where the direction of this exam started to make sense to me. You need to stand back and think big picture. Don’t just think what you would do in the vSphere client, think why you would recommend a certain storage protocol over another or how much compute resource you will need to satisfy resource requirements but also availability requirements for the business. Next I used the following material:
- Exam Blueprint
- VMware vSphere Design
- Designing VMware Infrastructure on Pluralsight by Scott Lowe
- vSphere Design Worksop
- vBrownBag Podcasts on iTunes
- VMware design tool question examples (accessible through MyLearn)