Recently I began the VMware vSphere : Install, Configuration, Manage course which is one of prerequisite courses required in order to take the VCP5-DCV exam.
The VCP5-DCV certification covers installing, configuring and managing a vSphere 5 environment with vCenter.
Anyone with any experience with VMware or virtualization in general knows that the VCP5 is a very sought after and respected certification.
I had the opportunity to take the course at an extremely discounted rate so I took advantage of it right away. The course covers the majority of the exam content, but not all. So significant self-study and lab work is required in order to pass the exam.
The study materials I am using to supplement the course are as follows:
In order to fully cover the topics on the exam and gain hands on experience a lab is required.
There are two main options for building home lab. First, build a physical lab consisting of physical ESXi hosts, shared storage and then virtualize the rest of the infrastructure. Second, build a nested lab consisting of a fully virtualized infrastructure. I chose the latter.
Since I already had a physical host running ESXi 5.1, I chose to virtualize my vCenter, iSCSI SAN, and domain controller.
I utilized FreeNAS for the iSCSI SAN. It is simple and straight forward to setup and does the job very well.
Due to the limitation of the CPU in my ESXi 5.1 server, I had to elect to run the ESXi 5.5 hosts in VMware Workstation on my desktop which is capable of nested virtualization. With this setup I am able to run a full vCenter environment along with virtual machines.
Here are some sample screen shots and a simple network diagram:
The VCP5-DCV certification covers installing, configuring and managing a vSphere 5 environment with vCenter.
Anyone with any experience with VMware or virtualization in general knows that the VCP5 is a very sought after and respected certification.
I had the opportunity to take the course at an extremely discounted rate so I took advantage of it right away. The course covers the majority of the exam content, but not all. So significant self-study and lab work is required in order to pass the exam.
The study materials I am using to supplement the course are as follows:
In order to fully cover the topics on the exam and gain hands on experience a lab is required.
There are two main options for building home lab. First, build a physical lab consisting of physical ESXi hosts, shared storage and then virtualize the rest of the infrastructure. Second, build a nested lab consisting of a fully virtualized infrastructure. I chose the latter.
Since I already had a physical host running ESXi 5.1, I chose to virtualize my vCenter, iSCSI SAN, and domain controller.
I utilized FreeNAS for the iSCSI SAN. It is simple and straight forward to setup and does the job very well.
Due to the limitation of the CPU in my ESXi 5.1 server, I had to elect to run the ESXi 5.5 hosts in VMware Workstation on my desktop which is capable of nested virtualization. With this setup I am able to run a full vCenter environment along with virtual machines.
Here are some sample screen shots and a simple network diagram:
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