New 2015 Certification Roadmap

VMware has released new certification roadmap with their new version vSphere 6.x. There are certain crucial changes been noticed with major one as No More VCAPs. Earlier VCAP was a distinguished certification where people with either of the VCAP Admin or Design exam could use the logo and certificate separately. Now this is been renamed to VCIX where 'IX' means Implementation Expert. People will have to now successfully pass both the Admin and Design certification to achieve VCIX certification. Reportedly, the exam times have been reduced from 4 hours to 2 hours.

Below is the picture published on VMware website for new roadmap. 

Some excerpts from their website on this,

VCA - there is no change in this certification except that there are two version of VCP exam under Cloud Management & Automation category, that is one VCP-CMA and other one is VCP-Hybrid Cloud. This will still be an online exam.

VCP - Will need to pass VCA first to get to VCP.

VCIX - There will still be two exams (Admin + Design) to achieve this certification. You will have to pass both the exams to get VCIX title.

VCDX - Not much of a change in this certification too except that it will be having a version number attached with it now. We will still need to clear both the Admin & Design exams (VCIX) to get to this certification. Existing VCDX's will only need to submit the design without attending the defense session.

There are still lot of open and unclear questions in this area that we need to wait until it becomes fully functional.

Endpoint & Agent Configuration

Once you are logged in using the added account in the previous post you should see a page similar to below, we will now add Endpoints.

Endpoints are nothing but the resources in terms of Cloud or physical infrastructure that will be consumed by the vCAC Virtual Machine during the deployment.

Business Group creation

Business group is a set of users that are provided with the set of services. Typically it can be a line of service or a department in an organization. A business group is created in a organization by the tenant administrator. A vCAC user must be part of at least one business group to request a machine.

To create a Business group,

Infrastructure --> Groups --> Business Groups,

Select 'New Business group' option,

Create Reservations & Policies

Reservation is a share of provisioning resources allocated by the fabric administrator from a fabric group and reserved for use by a particular business group.

There are three types of Reservations,

1. Shares of memory, CPU, networking, and storage allocated from one compute resource to a particular business group is called as Virtual Reservation.
2. When a set of Physical Machines are reserved for a particular business group for provisioning it becomes Physical reservation.
3. A cloud reservation provides access to the cloud services to the business group.

Create Network Profile

Network profiles are nothing but an entity that allows machines to be assigned static IP addresses. These profiles must be configured with the IP addresses that can be used. These are again very simple and nothing complex to discuss.

To create Network Profile,

Goto --> Infrastructure --> Reservations --> Network Profile