My VCP Exam Experience - VirtualizedGeek Tech Talks Episode 8
Transcript
com with another episode of virtualized geek tech talks this is episode 8. today is april the 7th 2013. this has been pretty interesting week for me uh last week i took the vcp exam so we'll talk a lot about the vcp and as well as one of my blog posts on what i like to call crowdsourced distributed cloud computing or we'll come up with a name for it or official name for it at some point but uh the first topic the vcp exam so you know i've been ragging on vmware again a lot about uh the fact that you have to take a five thousand dollar course to sit a 85 question text based exam that i don't really think does a great job of measuring your skill so this has been most definitely one of my pet peeves when it comes to the vcp officially set the exam friday i procrastinated up to the last minute when it came to studying but i was able to eat through a passing score of uh 340.
t infrastructure uh there was a couple of really good networking related questions that kind of tested your knowledge on overall networking which i think is a very key requirement for virtualization subject matter experts but overall i didn't think the test did a great job of measuring someone's independent knowledge of vmware products in general or vsphere and virtualization technology generator i thought that it was a test that could be uh easily gained so to speak if you didn't need to actually take the class you don't actually need to take uh have a home lab to kind of really pass the test i think you could pass the test based on just reading uh taking practice exams and not actually touching the product i think this is one of the challenges when it comes to completely text-based test tests that don't that aren't performance driven or have elements that have simulations to help really test the depth of someone's knowledge when it comes to a product i think we i'm sorry i think cisco does a great job of putting you in scenarios that really stretch your knowledge when it comes to uh different areas of their product and different areas of the technology so i'm looking forward to the day when vmware kind of rolls a simulation more of a simulation based exam that really does a better job of testing the depth and knowledge of the test taker i'm happy to have it done with what's next on the plate for me i don't know maybe the pmp or cisp i don't know i'm a little uh burnt out from studying uh that was an awful lot of uh knowledge that i won't use again in many situations to cram into my head in a few week period uh the next topic next topic is actually a pretty cool thought i had while listening to uh this week in google they talked about walmart and walmart using crowd source resources to do delivery and for whatever reasons you know how we geeks are you know we think about one thing and then we're going to complete tangent on another one this got me thinking about crowd source computing in general so you know if you remember the old seti uh project and the folding the genome folding project that helped map different proteins for cancer and then in a seti uh solution that helped to uh analyze data to find intelligent life outside of earth the ideal is that you take really big problems break them down to small components and then farm out the problems or the calculations to many pcs or many workstations so and you're able to the agent on the workstation would receive a workload it during the idle using the idle processing time of the cpu it would crunch that problem upload upload the problem back to a centralized repository and that data will be further analyzed really cool approach to using idle cycles uh they people got really creative there was at one point a folding client for the playstation 3 which really did a great job though that cpu really does a great job at that type of problem so you know i'm thinking well how do you cloud source cloud computing and you know i thought about using you know what would it take to do the same thing as the seti unfolding project where you could take multiple computers and either do some type of high performance computing solution or something as simple as running a linux vm on a fairly powerful machine that has a lot of idle cycles and then a service provider acting as a broker who would then uh farm out that those resources to consumers of cloud cloud consumers and then you know i thought about kind of who are the companies that are big enough smart enough to do that and the backbone requirements to do that type to provide that type of solution the first one that came to mind is actually google you know the one of the immediate challenges i thought about was bandwidth even with uh all that computing power this being idle so if someone has a macbook pro uh i7 a computer with i7 processor laptop desktop that's an awful lot of wasted cycles that of all powerful cpus is really not doing much so when you talk about running light cloud-based workloads uh kind of like uh hp's moonshot solution that they announce on how they're gonna use arm-based processors to provide the type of functionality that's truly needed in the data center outside of big database type applications you know those systems provide plenty of horsepower to drive most of the computing requirements needed needed for most enterprise computing so how do you deliver the image how do you manage the computing how do you manage failover how do you manage redundancy what happens if someone powers down a computer in the middle of operation so obviously you know what i'm not smart enough to really figure all of that out but what i do know is that google has both the bandwidth literally with google fiber they have the bandwidth to tackle some of the issues related to uh delivering images managing images uh managing uh fell over redundancy they have the bandwidth when it comes to engineers to solve the tough problems of uh redundancy of fell over uh and if you think about it it's kind of in their interest to do that type of thing i mean even from even if they internalize the solution if you know you if they could take you know ten thousand users and get five gig of disk space a local disk space from their machines how much more could they expand gmail email without actually adding more uh environmental impact in their data centers and buying more hard drives and in theory it should be relatively cheap and uh application specific you use this for this crowd-based cloud computing uh just like the seti and the folding projects were kind of tailor made for that distributed computing solution i think platform as a service or software as a service solutions are kind of tailor made for that type of computing solution or cloud computing solution maybe i've been traveling a little bit too much and i'm off base here but you know i like the idea you know i'd like to see what you guys think if i'm a little bit you know health or skelter when it comes to the possibility of it um what who other than google could tackle the problem uh could this be a thing that yahoo tackles we've talked a lot about how much uh ip yahoo yahoo still has especially in the infrastructure and cloud computing than big data arena well that concludes this episode of virtualized geek tech talk we'll talk to you guys next week thanks
