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.

First Impression of VCP-IaaS (VCPVCD511)

I was one of the selected candidates who were invited for the upcoming VMware VCP-IaaS (VCP-Infrastrcture-as-a-Service) certification which is based on VMware vCloud Director 1.5 version.

Today was the last day for the BETA period for this Exam. I finished the exam with 2:00 minutes to spare.

I spent almost 2 hours everyday for last one week to prepare for this BETA Exam. As per the information I have received only 500 or so people (with VCP5 certification) were invited to appear for this BETA. I have tried to get some people on this BETA who were not invited initially but for some I succeed and for some I didn't. Well, I did whatever I can but its not in my control anyway.

First of all, as the time was so short after appearing for the VCAP5-DCA BETA, I find it difficult to shock the family within a week's time that I will be an invisible man again for few hours every day. With our new born, it is very hard to read till late night and then wake up in the middle of the night and go to work next day. But I have managed to spare some time each day by grace of my superiors at work and this is the privilege of working at such company like VMware. 
 
To start with the preparation I reviewed the blue print in detail. Made a word document outlining the main subjects and the areas to watch carefully which needs more attention. I find this easy to read this word document at the last moment on the day of the exam as a final review. I am putting one copy each on my Touchpad and Playbook too so that I can read it whenever I find spare time. 

For me, I never worked on vShield, vCloud Connector or Chargeback so those were my weak points. vCloud Director as a whole is a challenging area itself. With my networking background I felt it little relaxed while reading about the vShield Edge, vShield Manager, NAT, VPN etc. etc.

I focused mainly on these two areas and one of my colleague Jeremy Sage (@thesage11) has given me some idea about what to prepare and where to put more weight while preparing and it was bang on.

Even if this exam is the initial level of the certification hierarchy (VCP) I decided not to run out of time as one needs to finish 115 questions in 130 minutes or so. But due to the complexity of some questions, they lead me to read them again to determine the correct answer or flag them to review later. As this area was not discovered before by me I took that as a challenge and referred all the possible guides and other official documentations with some few online videos on the public training portal. These all came very handy  when you have to visualize the GUI of vCloud Director or vCenter Chargeback or vCloud Connector.

For the preparation I looked at http://mylearn.vmware.com and found one FREE self-paced course on vCloud Director 1.5 about which I Tweeted few days back and very critically recommended course Deploy and Manage the VMware vCloud {Ver 1.5}. Subsequently I found some vShield related FREE self-paced courses as well.  (@artur_ka has blogged about it here). One recommended course "VMware vCloud: Deploy and Manage [1.5]" is now available which will help preparing for this exam.

So far I found the exam following the blue print very closely as other exams such as VCAPs. If you have not worked on the vCloud Director or any other components which are integrated with it, then you may want to spend some more time playing around with it in real life or at least in your home lab. You will find the blogs on creating vCloud Lab at home using various methods so it won't be hard at all. To be frank, I have downloaded all the bits and thinking to develop one lab using Workstation at home but "Time" just beat me to it. Now before I decide about giving any other exam on the list (yeah yeah, this is never ending process) I have to finish building the home lab with vCloud and View environment sitting side by side with SRM (if I could) to see how the backup and restore works for the vCloud using SRM.

As I mentioned I had only 2 minutes to review all the flagged questions so you don't need to stress at all as by the time the Exam goes GA there may be a change in the number of questions or if there won't be any then you have enough time to prepare if you start reading/preparing on the subjects mentioned above.

Looking at this BETA, I can say that future certifications on vCloud will be unique for sure.

You can also find the similar exam experiences posted and blogged by Tomas Fojta(@fojta) here and by Tomi Hakala (@tphakala) here. @arjantim has listed all the necessary study guides for this certification.

You can also register for VCP-IaaS on http://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrReg/plan.cfm?plan=32003&ui=www.

GA Blue print is available here. You can also try the mock exam for VCP5-IaaS

@jshiplett has blogged about the study guide objective here.

@lhjartarson has blogged about the study guide objective here.

@davidmdavis and @jakerobinson have created vCloud Director Essential Training on Trainsignal.com

Good Luck for VCPVCD511 to all who were waiting to appear for the GA release.

I have to dedicate this name VCP-IaaS to my dear friend @PunchingClouds very heavy heartedly and I know he will forgive everyone for that.  :-)

VMware vCloud Solutions Infographic

While attending the selfpaced training for vCloud Director 1.5 I found out this #Cool (Courtesy @esloof) Infographic about all the solutions provided by VMware for mainly all the vCloud components such as IaaS, Paas and SaaS.

As you can see by going from bottom to Top you will find the solution for each layer starting with
Foundation of Cloud Computing.

This image is part of this FREE online Self-Paced Course  "VMware vCloud Director Fundamentals [V1.5]" which is for 3.5 hours and which is completely worth attending.

I would suggest this course to all the people who are new to VMware vCloud and also to those who would like to take a challenge to Pass the VCPVCD511 (aka VCP-IaaS) certification when it becomes GA later this year as a first stepping stone for the Cloud Certification.

Good Luck and hope this helps.