VCP410 Passed

I passed my VCP410 exam today after failing it 2 weeks ago. Free second shot helped in not costing me money.

I read posts here before taking it the first time... I wanted to respond to Dynamik's question earlier. He asked if there were a lot of "where is the button" or "what view should you be in to see..." questions.

There is a huge mix of questions in this exam; very spread out. Something like

5 maximum questions
5 storage questions
5 know where the button question is
5 know your products questions...

At least thats how my experience was. I did better the second time because of the less maximum questions and less Choose 2 or 3 possible choice questions. I'm not good at memorizing what seems to be arbitrary numbers that you probably wouldn't think about again. And the choose 2 or 3 answer questions are tricky because I second guess myself.

Anyways, I still don't have a good lab up so since I don't do VMware at work. I'm still looking for a cheap lab out there. But the 'cheap' part is real tough.

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dynamik

Congratulations!

MentholMoose

Mishra wrote: »

I passed my VCP410 exam today after failing it 2 weeks ago. Free second shot helped in not costing me money.

Congrats on the pass!!

Mishra wrote: »

Anyways, I still don't have a good lab up so since I don't do VMware at work. I'm still looking for a cheap lab out there. But the 'cheap' part is real tough.

How "good" and how "cheap" do you want? I believe vSphere works in Workstation 7, so that may be a really cheap option to get you started. Performance might not be that good if you want to run several VMs on the virtualized vSphere hosts, but you could build a single really high-end system to run all this. If you want physical boxes to run vSphere, and just a few test VMs in them, watch the deal sites (techbargains, slickdeals, etc.) for deals on Dell PowerEdge servers. Sometimes they have VERY good deals on the basic servers.

A few months ago I saw a deal for a PowerEdge server for under $300. They had minimal RAM and storage, but they had Nehelem CPUs so you could use all the vSphere features, including FT. Two of these, plus a third box to run a SAN/NAS, and a low-end or used managed SOHO switch would be fairly cheap and good enough to run some test VMs. You could upgrade them incrementally as needed (e.g. more disks for the SAN, more RAM or NICs for the hosts).

EDIT: Here a screencast from someone talking about his VMware lab, which is similar to what I have described:
VIDEO: My home VMware vSphere Lab - David's Cisco Networking Blog

kalebksp

Congrats!

Mishra

Yup. I've been using VMware workstation hosting an ESX cluster but it's terribly slow. I was able to learn from it but really wished I had something that I could do more with.

jibbajabba

Mishra wrote: »

Yup. I've been using VMware workstation hosting an ESX cluster but it's terribly slow. I was able to learn from it but really wished I had something that I could do more with.

I wouldn't say it is terrible slow. I ran a 2-Host HA / DRS cluster from within vmware workstation and could work with it just fine. Obviously depends highly on your local PC perforamnce as well (especially RAM).

One thing which is PAINFULLY slow is installing a virtual machine inside the virtual ESX cluster

But once I had RDP it was ok ish ...