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VMware VCP 6.7-DCV – Objective 1.8 – Differentiate between VDS and VSS

August 28, 2020 by Samuel Mitchell, posted in VMware

The following notes will assist you to prepare for this objective:

You will need to know the features set of both type of switch
- Standard and Distributed switch
- Select the appropriate switch given a scenario
- Understand level of effort in administration
Don’t let questions mislead you on feature set
- Standard switches have significant functionality
Learn what the standards actually mean
- IEEE 802.1q / IEEE 802.3ad
Also be able to differentiate discovery protocols
- When would you use LLDP or CDP?
- Does that affect switch choice?
Be able to determine when a feature is appropriate
- Health check
- Beacon probing – detect uplink failure
- Notify switches – switch cache mac address
- Roll back
- Traffic shaping
- NIOC
Questions on NIC teaming rules are possible
Can you draw out how traffic flows given each load balancing algorithm is used?
- Route based on originating virtual port
- Route based on source MAC hash
- Route based on source IP hash
- Route based on physical NIC load
- Explicit failover order

Reference:

vSphere Networking Guide pdf – Chapter 8 – Networking Policies

VMware VCP 6.7-DCV – Objective 1.7 – Describe and identify resource pools and use cases

August 28, 2020 by Samuel Mitchell, posted in VMware

The following notes will assist you to prepare for this objective:

Resource management is an essential skills for passing VCP-DCV
- What resource are you being asked to control?
- Different resources have different controls
Know the resource pool settings
- You need to be able to select the right settings for a scenario
- Proportional share allocation
Why use resource pools

Reference:

vSphere Resource Guide pdf – Chapter 10 – Managing Resource Pools

VMware VCP 6.7-DCV – Objective 1.9 – Describe the purpose of cluster and the features it provides

August 28, 2020 by Samuel Mitchell, posted in VMware

The following notes will assist you to prepare for this objective:

Be aware of additional features of both HA and DRS
- HA provides option to enable VM fault tolerance
- HA provides optional VM Component Protection
- DRS rules control placement (affinity)
- DRS provides optional DPM
Make sure you have read and experimented with admission control
- Remember this is a gating of VM power on operations
- What is slot size? Different from %?
Ultimately DRS is automating vMotion
- So what stops vMotion from working?
- Incompatible CPUs!
Ensure you have looked at Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC)
- Can you explain CPU masking?
- Can you pick the appropriate use-case from implementation of either?
You need to have awareness of vMotion Encryption

Reference:

vSphere Availability Guide pdf – Chapter 2 – Creating and Using vSphere HA Clusters

vSphere Resource Management Guide pdf

Chapter 10 – Managing Resource Pools
Chapter 11 – Creating a DRS Cluster

vSphere Security Guide pdf – Chapter 6 – Encrypted vSphere vMotion

VMware VCP 6.7-DCV – Objective 1.10 – Describe virtual machine (VM) file structure

January 3, 2020 by Samuel Mitchell, posted in VMware

The following notes will assist you to prepare for this objective:

You need to know the files that make up a VM and what they do
- VMX, VMDK, VSWP, VMSD, VMSN, etc
You need to know their behaviour
- What gets created if missing?
- What is naming convention of files?
- What is the snapshot naming behaviour?
- Any differences between VMFS5 and VMFS6?
- How do resources reservation affects files?
You should also be familiar with virtual disk types
Try in your home lab to create VMs with
- Thin provisioned disk
- Thick provisioned disk
- Eager zero thick provisioned disk
- Could you convert from one disk type to another? How exactly?
Get to a vSphere host command line and look at what gets created
- Nothin like doing to lock this into your memory!

Reference: vSphere ESXi vCenter-Server 67 Virtual Machine Admin Guide pdf

VMware VCP 6.7-DCV – Objective 1.6 – Describe and differentiate among vSphere, HA, DRS, and SDRS functionality

January 3, 2020 by Samuel Mitchell, posted in VMware

The following notes will assist you to prepare for this objective:

HA has come a long way, don’t rely on legacy knowledge of HA to meet objective
Learn the newer features, pre-reqs and limitations of:
- Proactive HA
- Orchestrated Restart
- Fault Tolerance (FT) vSMP
HA can’t work around everything
- For example datastore connectivity loss or unable to satisfy reservation
Ensure you can explain the basic modes of DRS
- Disable, Manual, Partial, Full Automated, per-VM
DRS has come a long way
- Predictive DRS
- Limitations of vMotion have been overcome
What are the vMotion pre-reqs?
- CPU compatibility
- Network configuration
- Compatible virtual hardware
What virtual hardware options can and cannot be migrated with DRS?
SDRS often gets overlooked
- Remember it has 2 dimensions to optimization
  - Space utilization & I/O latency
  - What are you being asked in the question?

Reference:

vSphere Availability Guide pdf

vSphere Resource Guide pdf

Brian Graf Blog – https://www.brianjgraf.com/2016/10/17/vsphere-6-5-vsphere-ha-whats-new-part-3-orchestrated-restart/

VMware VCP 6.7-DCV – Objective 1.5 – Manage vCenter inventory efficiently

January 3, 2020January 3, 2020 by Samuel Mitchell, posted in VMware

The following notes will assist you to prepare for this objective:

What is efficient?
- Think about vCenter inventory hierarchy and its organization
- Parents/children/siblings
What constructs do you have available to you to organize objects?
- Datacenter object
- Cluster object
- Folder object
- Resource pool
- vApp
Be aware of dependency
- Can you create a cluster before a datacenter?
- Can you put a datacenter in a folder?
- Try these simple operations in your test lab
Are there any constraints on inventory object creation?
- Resource pools and vApps have scope
Can you scale beyond a vCenter?

Reference:

vCenter Server and Host Management Guide pdf – chapter 8 – Organizing the inventory

VMware VCP 6.7-DCV – Objective 1.2 – Identify vCenter high availability (HA) requirements

January 3, 2020January 3, 2020 by Samuel Mitchell, posted in VMware

The following notes will assist you to prepare for this objective:

Be very clear that this is vCenter availability management NOT host
Learn the topology of a vCenter HA deployment
- Nodes
- Roles of nodes
- What can and can’t they do? Particularly witness
Set up vCenter HA in your lab, so much more interesting study than just reading
- Easy to enable/disable
Make sure you read the vCenter HA section of the vSphere Availability Guide

Reference: vSphere 6.7 Availability Guide pdf – Chapter 4 – vCenter High Availability

VMware VCP 6.7-DCV – Objective 1.1 – Identify the pre-requisites and components for vSphere Implementation

January 3, 2020January 3, 2020 by Samuel Mitchell, posted in VMware

The following notes will assist you to prepare for this objective:

Know your vSphere technologies and what they do and what they don’t
- HA
- DRS
- FT
- vCenter HA
- vSAN
Don’t let questions mislead you on risks mitigated
- For example does DRS maintain availability?
Learn the vSphere 6.7 resource pre-reqs
- Minimum CPU & RAM
- Why do you need the HCL?
Think about post-install procedures
- Logging, scratch, dump collection
- Authentication
Know your way around VAMI
- Adding syslog, adding NTP, DNS settings

Reference: vSphere ESXi 672 Installation Setup Guide.pdf – Chapter 5

vCenter Server Installation and Setup pdf = Chapter 2

VCP65-DCV – Objective 4.2 – Perform vCenter Server Upgrades (Windows)

July 24, 2018July 24, 2018 by Samuel Mitchell, posted in VMware

The following reference material from the vSphere 6.5 online documentation will assist you in covering the main information that is needed to know the topics in this objective: