Help Create Some New DCD Study material / New Material

[JPM300]

Hello all,

So after just missing my first attempt at my DCD I figured I would take what I learned from that experience and help build some new practice material for those who are attempting the VCAP-DCD5.1/5.5 exam.  During my studies I found a lot of good material out there around the items on the blue print but didn't find a lot of material to help me get into the mind set / exam mode per say.  A good example of this is Joshua's Test Track for the DCA.  He has created some really good practice questions with a lab to boot to really get you in the right mind set for the DCA.  What I would like to do is build something simular for the DCD.

With that in mind, here is the project:

I would like to build a interactive webpage that will simulate what the design questions and drag-n-drop questions are like on the exam with some practice questions created by myself and other people of the community.  How I'm going to try and make it, I'm going to try and use jsPlumb or maybe other simular drag-n-drop java libraries with html 5 to help create an enviroment.  Here is a link to the jsPlumb so you can kind of get an idea of how it will work:

Demo

jsPlumb 1.6.4 demo - home (Vanilla)

Other Java libraries to try

http://www.codecademy.com/forum_questions/51aea0670b92bcd46d000667

This is what it will look like:

Once the frame work is in place we can create test questions and have an interactive testing system to also help grade peoples awnsers to help prep people for the DCD exam prior to writing.

Milstones of the project:

1.)  Create Photoshop and site layout - I have already completed this and continueing to work on it to get more scenario's, I will post the photoshop .psd shortly incase anyone wants to use them to create there own for the time being

2.)  Collect Good test questions with photoshop with an awnser page for the time being until the javascript is written -  this partialy done.  I currently only have two questions created

3.)  Put it all together and post it.  I'm in the process of registering a blog so once I get that done and everything is together I can post the interactive page there and link it in the forums

4.)  Shed less tears over failed DCD attempts

Here are the first two questions I have created:

DCD-Design-Q1

DCD-Drag-n-Drop-Q1

DCD-Q1-A1 - One possible design choice to suit all the requirements, there is many others.  I will also build on this design and put a section for NIOC for those who want to add in 10GB NICS

Now for a quick explanation to my awnser to the design.  For this one I put in an additional 2xQuad Port nics in the available PCI slots.  This allows for 2 nics for mgmt, 2nics for iSCSI, 2nics for backup, 2 nics for FT, 2 nics for DMZ for isolation, and 4 nics for the VMware Network as one of the requirement was it needed 2.43Mbps throughput.  Since you never truely get 100% on network transfer speeds I typically build out to 80%, which is 800Mbps for a 1GB nic.  So to meet the 2.43Mbps you would need a minium of 3 1GB NIC's, however this leaves a single point of failure as if one nic fails the VM Network can only push 2Mbps of traffic till that NIC is back online.  Thus I bumped the VMnetwork to 4 1GB NIC's so there was no single pont of failure.  If anyone else has better ways or other ways please feel free to post on it or work through the question.

DCD-Drag-n-Drop-Q1-A1

A quick Explantion of the design layout

Special thanks to lbourque for running this past the VMware Certification team so fast and getting the green light

If anyone wants to create some questions please post them here as I've told lbourque I'd post them here so they can be looked over incase there is any issues with them.

Current questinos / designs i'm working on:

vApp desing question

Storage design question

Calculation questions IE. what is the min amount of hosts you need to run X number of servers with X cpu, X memory, X networking

Multiple choice questions to hammer on the blue print topics like RPO, RTO, ect.

Thanks again, and I hope to get enough free time in the next few weeks to make some good progress on this.

Also please excuse any spelling mistakes / type-o's, I put this together pretty quickly and haven't had a great deal of time to look it over :smileysilly:

Cheers everyone and good luck!

[JPM300]

Ohh I didn't know I had an outstanding question on my hangouts my bad.  I will go take a look :smileysilly:

[JPM300]

5.5 Exam attempt and finally passed!

So I wrote my DCD for the third time yesterday and finally passed it.  My first two attempts where on 5.1, this attempt was on the 5.5 so I would know how it feels and to get a better idea of how to tweak the simulator in the future.

I found the DCD 5.5 exam a little better for a number of reasons

-  It seems more streamlined

-  I could get partial marks all the way through (Assuming I was getting at least half it right)  This is due to the drag-n-drop questions replacing the multiple choice

-  No multiple choice.  My brain has an issue with skipping a question without giving it a valid effort, even if it knows its a waste of time for 1 point.  So this helped a lot of myself at least.

The things that I found helped me a lot on this exam where the things I'm currently trying to build into a Study pack.  So hopefully I will get that done in the next little while.  Till then here is a short version:

-  Know Assumptions, Risks, Constraints, Requirements, Functional Requirements, and Non-Functional Requirements.  Know how to take a situation and break down items into these categories

-  Conceptual, Logical,  and Physical Design, know these well and how to take a situation and break down items into these categories

-  Compute, Sizing, and Calculations

-  Admission control and sizing(Calculate slot size and % based control)

-  Monster VM's and NUMA (Microsoft SQL, SAP, Exchange, ect)

-  Storage Best Practices, Fibre, iSCSI, NFS, PSP

-  Storage features,  Storage DRS, IO control ,ect.

-  Resource Pools, Child Pools

-  Networking best practices

-  NIOC

-  Autodeploy

-  Implementation steps / Implementation Plan

Overall my experience with this exam has been a great learning experience and also exhausting.  I'm glad I have finally accomplished this and look forward to finishing up my DCX track and then working towards my VCAP-DTD

Thank you all for the support and I look forward to continuing to supply content and assistant to those challenging the DCD

If anyone has any questions please let me know.

[ssbkang]

Congratulations!

[kamesh_a]

Congratulations

[CloudCredManage]

Congratulations! I've been reading through this series of posts with interest because I'd like to create some VCAP exam prep tasks for CloudCredibility.com. Daunting task - As no one knows better than yourself! What would you think about letting CloudCred link tasks to your VirtualTiers site? I'm not exactly sure what that would look like, but I thought I'd run it by you. You've put in an incredible amount of effort, and congrats on your recent pass! You can email me directly at NGreir@VMware.com - Best, Noell (CloudCredibility.com Community Manager.)

[JPM300]

Thanks everyone

@CloudCredManager, sure that sounds good I'll send you an email shortly.

[JPM300]

Small update

I am currently working on a study pack along with some new questions for the simulator.  The first chapter of the study pack has been posted and is on the last page of the simulator

http://www.virtualtiers.net/EndPage.html

The rest of the chapters will hopefully come along shortly.

[StephenRahul]

Dear Friends,

Thanks so much for your contribution on this site, this resource and sample question have been by far the closest thing that we can expect to get on DCD examination. I wanted to share that I cleared my DCD 5.1 yesterday in my second attempt, I had tried on October 13th, 2014 the first time and got 279. The exam was truly an eye opener and nothing similar to MS \ VCP certification, but never the less it was an experience that certainly came in handy when I sat again yesterday. one thing that I did notice was that the question pattern was different from what I got the first time, it was as follows:

18 Questions - Drag and Drop

6 Questions - Design

Remaining - Multiple Choice

I am happy to share my exam experience (please don't ask me question ) and prep notes and be part of any study groups that preparing for DCD 5.1, it will certainly help me in learning new things and re-inforcing what I have studied. Please drop me a note at rahul.stephen@gmail.com and we can discuss.

Thanks again and keep the good work going.

[ShadyMalatawey]

Dear Stephan,
Glad you passed yesterday Many congrats!!!
If you wanna share anything, you can join us on VCAP-DCD Study Group
Post whatever materials you want or any study notes.. It'll really help many of us
You can also contact Jason - JPM300- to help him creating many more example Qs on his web portal if you have some time.
Congrats again

[turobordecocina]

Congratulations!! KitchenAid and Cómo poner arroba

[StephenRahul]

Thanks Guys,

Wanted to share my notes with you, these are just pointers and I hope you find something useful from these.

I have joined the DCD study groups and its great to see so much enthusiasm for DCD, I wish I had found such groups earlier..... that would have made my grind easier

Kind Regards

Rahul Stephen

[JPM300]

Congrats Stephen!!

Glad to hear you passed and some of the materials posted have been helpful in your path to the DCD

Feel free to ping us about anything or continue to contribute to the community  

I'm trying to wrap up my study pack and get some more same questions on virtualtiers.net however time has been tight recently.  So hopefully it will wrap up before the new year.

Cheers and congrats! always glad to hear success stories

[JPM300]

Minor update

5 new Multiple choice questions submitted by Shady will be posted shortly.  I'm also getting really close to having 2 new design questions up and running.  Will post once I have them one.

[JPM300]

Hey everyone,

I have 5 new beta questions up on the site.  They currently are not linked in till I get them tested out.  They are submitted by Shady,

Here is how to access them for the time being.  Let me know what you think or if we got any of the calculations wrong

http://www.virtualtiers.net/page20.html

http://www.virtualtiers.net/page21.html

http://www.virtualtiers.net/page22.html

http://www.virtualtiers.net/page23.html

http://www.virtualtiers.net/page24.html

http://www.virtualtiers.net/page25.html

[Sateesh_vCloud]

Hi Jason,

Great to see your support for Community and also preparation docs for DCD Exam.

I'm lucky to be part of Goolgle DCD Study group and thanks for your efforts to prepare this material.

[Khadafee]

Hi JPM300 , do you have the link to test all the design question as per your post

[JPM300]

Hey Khadafee, Not sure which post your referring to?

www.virtualtiers.net has some practice design questions that are similar to what the test has but are different enough that VMware allows them

If you run through the site by click on the next button on the bottom right hand part of the screen it should take you to all the other questions.  At the end of the simulator there is a Study Pack which I'm creating www.virtualtiers.net/EndPage.html

Just click on the "here"  its a link to the doc

[JPM300]

Minor Update to the site

The Study Pack Doc at the end now has NIOC chapter finished with a practice test question which will make it into the simulator when I get a chance.

[JPM300]

Sorry for the lack of updates, life has been keeping me busy, however stuff is in the works.

With the 5.1 being retired shortly I will be over-hauling the site a little bit.  I will be taking the current simulator and moving it into a 5.1 exam section (Retired) and reworking a new simulator for the 5.5 exam to better simulator the experience.  I will also be taking the extra questions I had in the works with MSCS, Autodeploy, and Dependencies into the new 5.5 simulator. 

So hopefully in the next few weeks I can launch the new site / simulator. 

[KapilAswani]

Thanks Guys for Excellent Study Material. I passed my VCAP5-DCD