I am starting this thread to highlight my preparations for VCAP-DCA5 and VCAP-DCD5 exams. I will be writing about things I've learned along the way and share any tips with all of you who is going on the same journey shortly. I think it's never about the result, it's the things we learnt along the way that really counts and helps us to be a better VMware guy :) LOL
Here's the general Plan:
1)Build vSphere 5 Home Lab --- DONE!
2)Pass VCP --- DONE!
3)Pass VCAP-DCD5 --- waiting for official exam blueprint and exam to be released
4)Pass VCAP-DCA5 --- waiting for official exam blueprint and exam to be released
5)Prepare for VCDX5
At the moment, I am gathering study materials for my VCAP-DCD 5 exam, once I have them, I will post them here to share. There are quite a lot of other good blogs out there already listing pretty much same thing which I will also include to give you a one stop shop for studying materials.
Stay Tuned!
Hi
ReplyDeleteCould you post, how you have set up your home lab please, it will help understand what is required, in regards to home lab setup.
Thanks
Jitesh
Hi Jitesh:
ReplyDeleteThanks for leaving a comment. I'd love to share my exprience and hopefully it will help you in setting up your lab.
Originally I was hoping to use one of the HP N40Ls as my "NAS" box which boots OpenFiler or FreeNAS right off the USB key and utilize the underlying 3 x 250GB drivers to setup as RAID 0 for better performance. But it took me a while to get OpenFIler to install due to driver issue, so what I did is I install ESXi 5.0 on usb drives for all 3 of my HP N40L where 2 of them doesn't have any internal hard drive and one of the box has 3 x 250GB as internal. Now on the ESXi 5.0 box where I have 750GB internal drive, I first created an OpenFiler VM, then add virtual disks for this OpenFiler using as much free space I can on the local 250 drives. From the OpenFiler VM, I create a RAID 5 LUN and share that as iSCSI targets for all my 3 ESXi hosts. Once the shared storage is setup, then I created VMs for AD/DNS/DHCP, my vCenter Server 5, vDR 2.0 VM for backup, VM templates for quick deploy...etc the sky is the limit on what you can do with this lab. There are a lot of other ways of setting things up, but for me this is good enough for me to test lots of cool features of vSphere 5 and it might change later on when I have more equipment.
Hope this helps and have fun! Enjoy VMware!!!
Hi Peter
DeleteThanks for the information, much appreciated.
If you dont mind me asking, how did you setup the networking side.
did you create a seperate vswitch for iscsi and vmotion vmkernel ports?
also is vmotion and iscsi on different subnets? as thats where i get confused how to setup different subnets for iscsi and vmotion in a home lab without having a router to route traffic to different subnets or vlans.
Hi jitla:
ReplyDeleteI just use single subnet for all the networking in my lab. For simplicity, i suggest you start up this way to get things up running real quick. Since the hosts and vCenter server are on same subnet, they don't even need the default gateway to communicate. Hope this helps?
thanks Peter for the info, i hope to get my lab setup this weekend.
ReplyDeleteWill let you know, how i go, if thats ok with you?
did you create 3 seperate vm's for AD/DNS/DHCP?
so you have your own little virtual domain setup.
Hi jitla:
ReplyDeleteI have just 1 windows 2008 VM for my AD/DNS/DHCP with 512MB RAM and single vCPU, works just fine. because my N40L only has 1 onboard physical NIC at the moment, I can't really do vDS. but I created 2 virtual ESXi5.0 machines where I can assign multiple vNICs to them to setup standard switch and vDS :) once you have your lab setup, there are so many crazy things you can do. Next I plan to deploy vCloud Director 1.5 in the environment to test few things out and also I just got a HP1810G switch which allows me to do VLANs in the future. Also I need to test out SRM 5.0 which will be interesting. Good luck and feel free to share anything you encounter.