A lot of people are saying the VCAP4-DCA and VCP5 are hard to pass. After taking the VCAP4-DCA late October and the VCP5 late December, I was wondering why there are so many warnings; passing didn’t seem too hard. Maybe it’s the practical vs. theoretical clubs, but if you administer an enterprise or service provider VMware environment using several basic techniques like HA, DRS, network or fiber-channel storage, both are really doable.

Either way, to pass these exams, you definitely need to have handson experience. If a test environment is not an option, explore on the environment you do have at hand. I’m not an advocate of testing in production environments, but you can do a lot in a cluster without actually breaking the VMs. Just reading the documentation is not going to get you there.

The VCAP4-DCA exam is performed in a live test lab that VMware will set up for you, so be ready to configure and test. The surprise that I got was that they actually requested a lot of performance charts & powercli (?!); don’t skip stuff on the blueprint.

The VCP5 exam is pretty different than VCP4, for the better. VCP4 focussed a lot of stuff you can get from theory, like maximums & minimums. VCP5 however was more technical questions and less on the theory. Meaning you can get to think.

Most of all, try to have fun when you’re sitting down to do these, it makes it easier. Picture how you would configure something, then pick the right answer.

Resources:
- VCAP4-DCA Blueprint: http://mylearn.vmware.com/register.cfm?course=70779
- VCP5 Blueprint: http://mylearn.vmware.com/register.cfm?course=103110
- http://thesaffageek.co.uk/vcp5/
- http://cosonok.blogspot.com/2011/10/vcp510-vcp-on-vsphere-5-exam-cram-notes.html
- http://vinfrastructure.it/certifications-on-virtualization/vcp/vcp5/

Mock exams:
- Simon Long: http://www.simonlong.co.uk/blog/vcp5-practice-exams/
- VMware: http://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrSurvey/assess.cfm?item=24908&user=0&refer=0&p=0&ui=www_cert

A love for Apple’s OSX and computing devices brings some side effects. One of them is that you’re stuck with VMware Fusion which is way behind it’s Windows counterpart, VMware Workstation. Fusion cannot import .ovf VMs, just .vmx VMs. In my case, I needed to convert the vSphere Management Appliance to a VM that could run in VMware Fusion.

It took me a while to this neat tool: http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/server/vsphere/automationtools/ovf - ovftool is a utility that can convert virtual machines between certain formats.

Once you have it downloaded and installed, you can use the commandline tool to convert the .ovf to a .vmx like this:

ovftool --acceptAllEulas vMA-4.1.0.0-268837.ovf vMA.vmx

Then just double click or import the .vmx into Fusion

Yes, you read right. Instead of using this domain just for email and my servers, I am going to use this site. Probaly just going to be handy articles (for myself), backend scripts, pictures and some time-wasting games. I have too many separate systems (dns, backups, monitoring, etc), of which I was sick of a week ago. It’s a wonderful mesh of it all.