CCNA CLD-ADM Supplemental Study Notes
I'm taking the vDC Policies memory table from the official cert guide and expanding based on the information in
the Cisco UCS Director 5.5 Administration Guide and is intended to supplement the Cisco Press Official Cert Guide.
vDC (virtual DataCenter) Policies
- System Policy: Includes VM Naming, Power on after deploy option, Time Zone, DNS Suffix, DNS Domain, WINS, VM Max Boot wait time, Image Type (OS), Licensing information, Unique SID, Autologon (example kiosk systems), Workgroup or Domain Join info (required DA creds), VM Annotations
- Computing Policy: # of vCPUs, CPU reservation (MHz), CPU limit (MHz), CPU shares, memory, memory reservation, memory limit, memory shares. Resizing Options
- Networking Policy: Static IP Pool, IP Subnet Pool, IP Overlap Options, NIC Alias, Portgroups (Allow end user to select, IP type - DHCP vs static, IP Pool Policy or inline IP Pool for static), Network Provisioning Policy, VLAN pool policies
- Storage Policy: Data Stores/Data Store Clusters Scope, SDRS rules, Storage Options (Use Local Storage, NFS, VMFS, SAN), Override Template (Use Thin Provisioning -dynamic allocation, Manual Disk Size), Resizing Options, Hard Disk Policy (Disk Size -GB, Controller Options, Disk Provisioning Options)
- End User Self-Service Policy: Defines actions end user can take for their VM. Assigned to vDC. Things such as snapshot management, restart guest OS (requires hypervisor tools ie VMware tools), perform migration to public cloud (Requires Intercloud Fabric), vNIC configuration, options limited to account type also.
- User Action Policy: Used for execution of orchestration workflows after provisioning of the VMs
- Cost Model: Used to define cost metrics that can be used for chargeback such as cost for network bandwidth utilized as well as compute and storage resources.
The first attempt for my exam is scheduled tomorrow at 3:00 PM CST. Hopefully, I am able to nail it on the first try. If not, I have one more attempt before my recert deadline. Each attempt is $300 so this sort of thing is not cheap.
A couple recommendations for any considering taking this exam:
- Do NOT rely only on the official cert guide to pass as it does not cover everything in the Exam Outline. I am supplementing with material on safaribooksonline and Cisco documentation.
- If you are getting close to your recert deadline, remember the retake policy is 5 calendar days after a failed attempt. Give yourself enough time to accomodate this. I did not and hopefully I am able to pull it off.
That's pretty much all I got. I'll report back after my test and let yall know what kind of gotcha's I run into. Of course, I will not be able to disclose specifics of the questions but I can tell you the topic and if it could be expected on the exam outline. I know from experience that Cisco will throw a curveball in their exams which I experienced with CCNA wireless.
For example, the exam topics indicating understanding how to configure connectivity for various wireless supplicants which seem to entail basic configuration. They actually drilled down into specifics about configuring a MacOS. I provided them feedback and even got a free voucher. Thankfully that exam has been updated.