Well, today I got a flight to Frankfurt, Germany. I’m speaking at a VMUG here about the subject of DR and the cloud. [That reminds me I have some photos to find for the PPT]. The flight gave me time to do some more work on the vCloud Director courseware I got a few week back. I’m pleased to say I’ve completed my first run throught the literature, although there’s a great many labs I need to double-back to. In the end I put the peddle to the metal and read the modules without practising each of the practicals in my “home” lab. That was slowing me down – as every practical I did resulted in a blogpost being written – about 27 of them so far!
Anyway, I’ve made a hit list of tasks to do between now and the dreaded exam. I’m not helped on the course front. Sadly, my 1st booking was cancelled, and now the second booking looks doubtful. At this rate it’s likely that I will be ready to take the exam before the course. That isn’t my idea of ideal preparation, but the situation reflects the economic situation. It’s not like businesses have loads of money to throw around on training, and its not like the training companies can afford to run a course without the required quorum. It doesn’t add up.
So give this situation what’s a budding vCloud Director guy supposed to do. Here’s my hit list:
- I’ve made notes during my reading, and boiled the course down to about 40 pages of notes. I need to go through my other notes and consolidate these into one file that I can quickly work through for revision purposes
- I need to go through all the labs. Plus everything the manual says you “can do” I want to configure, even if that “can do” isn’t in the lab manual.
- Read and make personal notes on the vCAT (vCloud Architecture Toolkit)
- I want to hit the official admin PDFs, now I have good idea of how vCD works just to see if there’s tasks/info that isn’t in the course. Few courses are completely comprehensive, and their intended to be beginning of the learning curve, not the end of it…
- Finally, I want to look through the exam blueprint. This is something I perhaps should have done at the beginning. But as my mind starts thinking about the exam, and as I’ve learned a lot in the last couple of months – I’m sees right to look through it and see if there’s anything there that comes across as surprise. As we all know courses/courseware rarely maps directly to exam objectives. The course is about how to use the product in the real world, not how to pass the VCP-Cloud exam.
- …oh, and the other thing I want to do is learn how to backup/restore vCD, as well doing all these tasks in the GUI via PowerCLI. Mainly for my own lab purposes so I can tear down, and rebuild vCD on different releases. At some stage I will be running on beta versions of vSphere and vCD and I want an easy way to tear down/redeploy not just the vSphere layer but the vCD layer too…