Overwhelmed!

tstrip007

Studying for the VCP. I have a fully functional lab up and I have been going back and forth from scott lowes book to trainsignal videos while in the lab. Please tell me its natural to feel overwhelmed while learning this.

slinuxuzer

It's incredibly hard to wrap your head around, and honestly you don't really understand it until you have deployed an enterprise environment a few times, more like 4-5.

ChooseLife

VCP is not an entry-level cert for VMware. I tackled it with 4+ years of production experience, and there was still A LOT to learn for the exam.

Essendon

Like the other guys said, it's not an entry-level cert and not easy to get your head around. Just take it one thing at a time. Go slooooowwwww! Understand why/how stuff works and lab it up. Break/tweak it, invent scenarios, learn from multiple sources. There are numerous blogs out there to help you with this. If something isnt clear, Google it and learn from an alternative source. VMware have all their documentation available for free download, try that too. But you MUST lab for the material to make sense.

Keep at it, this is an incredible technology and may take a while to learn - but it's totally worth it. Let us know if there are specific things your having trouble with, plenty of smart cats around here to lend a helping hand.

N2IT

Do you actually manage VM's or just going for the certification?

tstrip007

Thanks for the feedback. I've been working with vSphere in a production environment (13 hosts, 100 vms) for about a year an a half. Mostly adding new hosts and provisioning new vms, a couple of P2V. I did not do the initial design. I like working with it and I'm determined to master it.

kj0

Do you have SANs? Are they iSCSI connected or Fiber Channel?

I have just started this last week. I have almost 2 years experience using vSphere 4. so it's a little behind and only being 3 hosts and 2 SANs via iSCSi it is a little ...small. However, we have spent quite some time researching and discussing growing the numbers of hosts and storage and upgrading to 5. So from that, I have a bit more background to go on and I am still feeling left in the corner rocking back and forth. I set up my lab yesterday and I think I may have done it wrong. (Mainly because I'm using VMware workstation and nesting inside that while using an external SAN.) I'm working on it, but it is definitely daunting and not to be taken lightly.

After doing (attempting) the MS 70-640, that Lab and study was easy to understand and build. 5 Vms running, give them all IPs and run with it, but the exam was a killer. I'm hoping this will be the opposite, a real pain to get my head around and learn, but simple in testing.

Good luck, I'm interested in how your lab is set up.

Thanks.

Haswell

tstrip007 wrote: »

Studying for the VCP. I have a fully functional lab up and I have been going back and forth from scott lowes book to trainsignal videos while in the lab. Please tell me its natural to feel overwhelmed while learning this.

Checkout ITdvd.com I liked their VMware training more than trainsignal's.

tstrip007

Thanks. Will def look into itdvd. I to have everything nested inside of workstation. I have a 1tb sata and 16gb of ram, i3 processor. I'm using iSCSI with the LUNs on the vcenter server. My lab setup is nearly identical to the lab setup guide found here - boerlowie.wordpress.com

fly2dw

I think it is quite natural to feel overwhelmed by this certification. This is a platform technology which means that there is a lot of other types of technology that collaborates with it, such as various client/network OS's, networking, server hardware, and storage. Luckily I had a good background of servers, various OS's, and iSCSI storage. I had a little networking knowledge to get me by and was certified to Network+ level. Studying for the VCP showed me that I needed to get better on networking to appreciate how things work.

When I was reading the networking side of things in Scott Lowe's book it seemed to make sense, but I didn't really have a great appreciation for some of the concepts. I felt I could do the HOW but asked myself WHY quite a lot and had no accurate answers. I was going to do a CCNA anyway and decided to give the Cisco Press ICND1 book a once over (Doing some lab work in packet tracer along the way). I also covered the switching section of ICND2 (Mainly for the VLAN explanation. I knew what a VLAN was through experience, but I needed to know more about the setup on a physical switch so that I could comprehend how it worked, and how to it worked when connected to VMware).

When I came back to the VMware networking side in Scott Lowe's book, things made a lot more sense to me. Hands on experience also helped as I had the opportunity to do a few deployments of vSphere 5.1 at work. But my point is I don't think the overwhelming feeling is just because of VMware. At least for me it was more to do with the other technology you need to know, that you may not necessarily have a lot of experience with. It takes less than a minute to create a vswitch or distributed switch in vSphere. Same as defining a vlan and tagging etc. But understanding the concept behind it and why you would do it is something different. This is where reading the Cisco books helped. You don't need to get yourself ready for a Cisco cert in your reading, just take in the concepts and most importantly take away the WHY part.

My advice on this (Which seems obvious) is don't be afraid to go off and find other resources from different vendors when it comes to different technology within the course which isn't specifically VMware. For example when storage comes up go look at a NetAPP, Dell, or HP book/whitepaper to better understand that concept. You may need to provision storage to your ESXi infrastructure from a SAN if you have one. Well vSphere doesn't do this part for you, it is done on your SAN (Via an interface). Therefore go and read, the SAN vendors documentation, to get an appreciation on this process as this will aid your understanding. Stick with the Scott Lowe book as a primary reference, as I found it a great study guide, but read secondary resources too.

Good luck!!

tstrip007

You're absolutly right fly2dw. I had heavily considered knocking out a network and storage cert prior to attempting the VCP. This is def. something that cant be memorized and HAS to be understood. After putting a lot of hours in this weekend, I'm starting to feel more comfortable and confident. Thanks for all the encouragement and advice from all you senior members. I plan on scheduling an exam for mid July just to gauge where I'm at.

jibbajabba

If you work for a VMware partner then have a look at the partner central portal - there are free "certifications" you can take - VSP and VTSP (Sales Professional, Technical Sales Professional). The training for the latter goes a bit deeper into vmware networking - not greatly, but certainly good to see the stuff "in action"