VCDX Sponsorship - A cool idea !!

Hi VCDX Aspirants,

If you are not aware about this but recently Nutanix has offered Sponsorship to anyone who is going for VCDX or in process of attaining VCDX.

The exact criteria is described here:

"We are looking for someone who has successfully completed all of the prerequisite exam requirements for VCDX and is ready to submit a Nutanix-based design for their VCDX defense. The lucky chosen candidate will receive as much preparation support as needed and have all submission fees paid for by Nutanix. Let us help you achieve your ultimate goal of becoming a member of the exclusive VCDX community."

And the benefits are:

The chosen candidate will receive:
• A VCDX bootcamp to prepare the candidate for the VCDX defense
• The VCDX submission fees paid for by Nutanix
• Travel and lodging for the VCDX defense


Now looking at this trend, wondering tomorrow or in near future all the big players e.g. EMC, NetApp, IBM, HP etc. will come up with an offering like this, which would give a candidate a chance/motivation to include the components in their design and get benefits of such offerings.

Now this is just my assumption here but it is something which can be done and the company will get more visibility in the community by promoting the VCDX process as a whole which is Elite and Unique in itself.

People are becoming more innovative day by day so not sure what kind of other offers they may started getting from such organizations or even from their employer, which eventually boost the morale of a person to go for such valuable status being a "VCDX".

Good Luck to those who entered in this offer from Nutanix and love to see more of such offers from others in the community.

Share and care !!

Cheers !! 

Passed VCP-Cloud - Links and Resources

I attempted the BETA Exam and missed it by few. Saw all the Tweets when the BETA results was announced as people were passing. I had nothing but to take that as an opportunity to prepare again and Never give up.

For last week or so I have been studying the vCloud, vShield, vCloud Connector and Chargeback.

Today I went to one of the centers to give the VCP-IaaS Exam and after finishing the survey my heart beats are started to becoming little faster. With all the study resources I have gone through which were immensely  helped me to understand the concepts of vClound and other components tied up with it.

Chargeback is definitely a BEAST which will play a crucial role in organizations when it comes to cost and resource allocation. So much new to learn about it and I can see the future of Chargeback is very bright along with the vCloud implementations where the strength of the same can be utilized in both Public and Private Clouds. Now a days everything e.g. Storage, Networking becoming cheaper in the cost per GB per / MB. But still to see if your underlying hardware resources are fully optimized or not and giving you the best ROI with reasonable CAPEX/OPEX involved, it will be a priority subject for any organization which are in the business of using IT infrastructure.

I would probably posts about Chargeback in near future as it keeps attracting me by its features and offerings.

Finishing the 85 questions I got only 90 minutes but was able to finish it within lot of time to review the questions. As I pressed End Exam and I could not see the "Congratulations" word right away but saw your score which was "426", which means I passed. :-). I was excited while attempting the questions so not even bothered to review all the questions but just went back reviews 4-5 flagged about which I was double minded. Now the journey is just started in the vCloud track as VCP-Cloud is the first stepping stone while going for VCAP-CID (BEAT recently finished) and VCAP-CIA (not released yet).

Now lets discuss the resources I have used to prepare for this exam.

1) First of all the official documentation are the highest priority who ever is preparing for the examination. Majority of them are listed here by @davidmdavis.

2) I went through all the videos posted on mylearn.vmware.com for vCloud Training which I blogged about earlier. 

3) vCloud Deploy and Manage Course - offered by VMware Education.

4) VMware vCloud Director Fundamentals - offered by VMware Education.


5) Before going for the exam David Davis also helped me in last few days to review the recently launched training from TrainSignal "VMware vCloud Director Organizations" by @jakerobinson which I highly recommend to anyone who wants learn about vCloud Director and preparing for this certification. Its kind of paced training so the basic requirements includes the knowledge of related components to understand the subject better. there is vCloud Director Essentials Training is also available which will give you the knowledge about vCloud Director setup and other features offered by the same.

6) I'm previous post I have listed some links where similar resources are blogged about community members. but recently I referred the blog from Larus Hjartarson (@lhjartarson). He blogged about VCP-IaaS study notes. 

7) VCAT 2.0/ 3.0 documents

8)  Home LAB :-)

Cheers and Good Luck to all.

VCP-IaaS Objective 3.2 Configure and Generate vCenter Chargeback Reports

In preparation for the VCP-IaaS Exam majority of the blueprint items are covered by @lhjartarson on his blog, but few objectives are probably in progress or never finished so to help the readers and the VMware community I am putting down here "Objective 3.32 Configure and Generate vCenter Chargeback Reports" from the blueprint of VCPVCD510 Exam Blueprint Version 1.2 (Updated 26 July 2011).

Objective 3.2 – Configure and Generate vCenter Chargeback Reports

Knowledge

• Identify vCenter Chargeback report types
• Identify components of the reporting dashboard
• Given a reporting requirement, determine what report type should be run
• Schedule reports
• Manage archived reports
• Generate custom reports

There are four types of reports one can generate in Chargeback Manager 

vCenter Chargeback Manager enables you to generate following reports for a chargeback hierarchy and for entities in the hierarchy.

1 Cost Reports - A cost report provides the cost and utilization information for each computing resource for the hierarchy or entity on which the report is generated based on the cost configured in the hierarchy and the cost model selected during report generation.

2 Usage Reports - A usage report is similar to a cost report except that it provides only the computing resource utilization data. This report type is useful when you only want to analyze the resource utilization for various entities in a hierarchy.

3 Cost Comparison Reports - A cost comparison report enables you to compare the costs for each resource and entity based on two different cost models.

4 Showback Reports - A showback report lets you analyse how the costs are distributed among the entities based on a specified distribution policy. This report type is useful when you know the total cost and want to analyze how this cost is distributed among the entities by selecting different distribution policies.

Report Dashboard

vCenter Chargeback Manager provides a report dashboard that displays various graphs providing information about the resource cost and usage for a selected hierarchy or entity for the last 30 days excluding the current date.

The report dashboard displays three charts, Cost per Resource, Cost per child Entity, and Cost per Day, for

the selected hierarchy or entity. The dashboard also provides an option to view the following Top N reports:

1 Top N most expensive VMs

2 Top N least expensive VMs

3 Top N CPU consuming VMs

4 Top N Memory consuming VMs

Here, N can take the values 10, 20, and 50.

For a hierarchy that includes a vCenter Server that is integrated with VMware vCenter Operations, the Dashboard provides the following details:

• The Cost per Resource bar chart in the Cost projection tab shows cost for each resource, which is color coded, for the past 30 days and projected data for next three months in sets of 30 days each.
• The Cost per Day graph in the Cost projection tab charts the variance in the total cost for the entity for the past 30 days and projected data for next three months.
• The Cost Optimization tab lists the following optimization opportunities: Oversized Virtual Machines, Undersized Virtual Machines, Idle Virtual Machines, and Powered Off Virtual Machines.
• For each optimization opportunity, the corresponding virtual machines along with the configured and recommended resource-cost details are listed.

NOTE

• The graphs and optimization reports are generated only if the vCenter Server user, which was used for adding the vCenter Server to vCenter Chargeback Manager, has either the Global.vCenter Operations User privilege or the Global.vCenter Operations Admin privilege assigned on the root folder.
• Cost projection reports are enabled only with pure usage-based cost model, else graphs based on only past 30 days data are displayed. If the hierarchy is less than 30 days old and is not back-dated, then the graph based on the available data is displayed.

Scheduling reports

When creating a report, you can choose to schedule the report generation from the Create Report screen. You can schedule cost reports, cost comparison reports, and usage reports. Showback reports cannot be scheduled. Other than the create privilege for report and schedule resource types, you must have read privilege on the hierarchy, chargeback hierarchical entities, and cost models to perform this task

On the Schedule page and set the scheduling parameters.

Option                                                  Description

Report Creation Time                    When the report has to be generated.

Recurrence Pattern                         How often the report has to be generated.

Range of Recurrence                      Till when the report has to be generated periodically.

Managing Archived Reports

The Archived Reports page of the Reports tab displays a table listing all the reports archived in the application.

This includes manually generated and saved reports as well as reports generated by report schedules.

All the reports generated by a single schedule have the same name but different Created on and Billing

Period values. 

The reports are listed in the ascending order of their creation time. You can view an archived report by clicking it.

1 Export Archived Report - After a report is generated and archived, it can be exported to the required format at any time.

2 Email Archived Report - After a report is generated and archived, you can send it through email to one or more recipients.

3 Delete Archived Report - You can clear the archive by deleting unwanted reports.

4 Advanced Search for Archived Reports - You can search for specific archived reports by using the advanced search feature of vCenter Chargeback Manager.

VMware Training and Credits

Here is the summary where you can associate the VMware Training and how many training credits that course has.

Its easy to interpret the credits into the training you can attend for the courses offered by VMware Education as of today.

If you have any question and you can visit the Education and Certification site.

http://mylearn.vmware.com/portals/www/

Enjoy learning.