The VCA-DCV Cert

The most interesting links in my twitter feed this week have all been about VMWorld 2013 and the new technologies VMWare is making available in vSphere 5.5. As I don’t actually use VMWare at work (we’re using KVM and AWS at the moment) very little of it is immediately relevant to me - but then I spotted the ‘VMWare Certified Associate - Data Center Virtualization’ announcement.

There is some combination of both being stuck inside waiting for family to arrive and pure envy about all the new cool stuff that tempted me in to watching the (free) VMWare Data Center Virtualization Fundamentals training course, reading the exam blue print and making an attempt at the exam. Although it wasn’t as much fun as I’d hoped I’m still glad I did it.

The course introduces you to the usual basics of virtualisation (consolidated workloads, less cooling cost etc.) and the VMWare vSphere product family and then explains at quite a high level what each component does and how it can address certain technical and business needs. While the level of detail isn’t that deep if you’ve never used VMWare it does give you a good introduction as to what all the fuss is about. If you’re an experienced vmware admin who keeps current about new products then you’d probably be able to pass the exam without redoing the whole course - but it might be worth scrolling through the topics to spot any you don’t know about. In my case I’d never heard of the vSphere Storage Appliance until this weeks blog posts.

The course can be taken from home on your own PC so I’m doubtful about it holding value, I’d expect the brain dump sites and the unsupervised nature of the exam to cause a very high percentage of passing. I don’t think I’ll add the cert to my actual CV, the VCP is probably the minimum I’d want before I added a new entry but I will add it to my linkedin profile to see if causes any change in my usual recruiter traffic.