VCAP-CID Study Guide

In this section of my blog I will be going through the VCAP-CID exam blueprint sections/objectives.

The VCAP-CID exam, or VMware Certified Advanced Professional – Cloud Infrastructure Design exam, is intended for a audience that have 2 years of virtualization experience, and know almost everything there is to know about vCloud technologies (vCloud Director, vShield Edge, Chargeback Manager) and I want to add it’s also good to have good knowledge of most of the applications in the Operations Manager suite as well (Operation Manager, Configuration Manager, Infrastructure Manager).

The exam will consist of 115 items, made out of multiple choice, drag-and-drop and specialized design questions. It will require a score of 300, out of a scoring between 100-500.

The time you will have to write the exam is 195 min (3 hours – 15 min) and if English is not your native language you get 30 min extra.

If you fail you will need to wait 14 days before trying again, and there is no limit in the number of retakes.

I want to add, even just studying for the exam will help you become better at cloud design, even if it doesn’t use vCloud as a foundation.

And as before I recommend that you create a design around made up requirements just to get the idea around what is needed, and to get an idea on how the process works.

And as I did for my IaaS study guide I’d like to point to my fellow vExpert, Gregg Robertson, at theSaffaGeek.co.uk, for further VCAP-CID material.

Also I recommend reading the whole vCAT (VMware Cloud Architecture Toolkit) documentation, either the PDF version or the book version.

But enough of introductions, here are the sections and objectives on exam blueprint 2.8 (27. Nov 2013):

Section 1 – Create a vCloud Conceptual Design

Objective 1.1 – Create a Conceptual Design Based on Business Requirements

Objective 1.2 – Identify and Categorize Business Requirements

Objective 1.3 – Determine Capacity Requirements for a Conceptual Design

Objective 1.4 – Determine Availability Requirements for a Conceptual Design

Objective 1.5 – Determine Security and Compliance Requirements for a Conceptual Design

Objective 1.6 – Create Service Definitions for a Conceptual Design

Section 2 – Create a vCloud Logical Design

Objective 2.1 – Determine Catalog Requirements for a Logical Design

Objective 2.2 – Determine Organizational Structure for a Logical Design

Objective 2.3 – Define and Size Components for a Management Cluster

Objective 2.4 – Define and Size Resource Groups

Objective 2.5 – Determine Virtual Datacenter Structures for a Logical Design

Section 3 – Create a vCloud Physical Design

Objective 3.1 – Create a Physical vCloud Network Design

Objective 3.2 – Create a Physical vCloud Storage Design

Objective 3.3 – Create a Physical vCloud Compute Design

Section 4 – Create a vCloud Security Design

Objective 4.1 – Create a Directory Authentication Structure for a vCloud

Objective 4.2 – Design a vCloud for Multi-Tenancy

Section 5 – Create Extended vCloud Designs

Objective 5.1 – Design a Hybrid vCloud

Objective 5.2 – Design a Multi-site vCloud Solution

Section 6 – Determine Availability Requirements for a vCloud Design

Objective 6.1 – Incorporate Availability Requirements into a vCloud Design

Section 7 – Determine Metering and Compliance Requirements for a vCloud Design

Objective 7.1 – Determine Isolation Requirements for a vCloud Workload

Objective 7.2 – Determine Logging Requirements for a vCloud Design

Objective 7.3 – Determine Management Policy Requirements for a vCloud Design

Objective 7.4 – Determine Chargeback Policies and Metrics for a vCloud Design

Section 8 – Create a vApp Design

Objective 8.1 – Define a vApp Network Topology

Objective 8.2 – Determine Remote Access Requirements for a vApp

Objective 8.3 – Determine Shared Infrastructure Requirements for a vApp

Objective 8.4 – Determine Requirements for Multiple vApp Instances