Last week Chuck gave an update on the launching of EMC's latest certification course, and mentioned that there were nearly 500 people signed up to take the course.
Earlier this year I was invited to participate in the creation of the test and a beta version of the course. I got an insider's view into how it is all put together. To be honest, I didn't have that much to contribute. When you spend most of your time building the insides of a new storage system (VNXe), it's hard to keep up with the deep knowledge and field nuances required to build a virtualized data center (VDC).
Now that the VDC course (and exam) are launched, the EMC Ed Services team will turn their attention to the expert version of the EMCCA track (Cloud Architect) for both the course and the exam. I will raise my hand should they need volunteers; exam and course generation brings together the experts in VDC and cloud design, not only from EMC, but from Intel, VMware, Cisco, and other companies as well. Listening to their conversations is an education unto itself.
In my opinion the main reason to go to the course is to interact with the customers and field experts that are in attendance. Some of them are server virtualization experts, some favor the network side of things, several are storage virtualization gurus, and yet another segment have experience with virtualizing apps. The course drills deep into all of these areas (in fact it is a two-day fire hose of information).
The real crux of the class, in my opinion, starts in Module 3.
Designing For Virtualized and Cloud Environments
Virtualized data center design is an exercise in requirements gathering. The requirements (e.g. elasticity, self-service on-demand, resource pooling) are not necessarily easy to articulate.
The main role of a VDC architect, therefore, is to have a framework for gathering cloud requirements, and then translating them into an architecture and design that satisfies those requirements. The course outlines a requirements gathering framework,under the assumption that the customer is transforming from an existing data center (as opposed to a greenfield deployment).
Here is a requirements gathering framework (in a nutshell):
- Gather data
- Inventory resources
- Document Current state
- Determine Key project drivers
- Perform Initial Analysis
- Identify opportunities to consolidate
- Draft initial VDC strategy
- Document Priorities
- Create Justification
- Evaluate Technology Options
- Compute resource considerations
- Network resource considerations
- Storage resource considerations
- Application resource considerations
- Management strategy considerations
- Create Plan
- Document Future State
- Document Migration Plan
- Review Design, Plan and Justification
Each of these steps has checklists and strategies on how to gather requirements and translate them into a design. They represent a starting point.
The real learning about this framework begins with the class commentary:
- "That didn't work for me, because....".
- "I use this approach when....."
- "I recommend inserting an additional step...."
- "Where is the step that takes these business silos into account...."
The curriculum, and the labs, are geared to stimulate conversation between actual and aspiring VDC architects. In fact, I would estimate that at least one full day is spent designing a VDC alongside classmates.
I recommend the course. Afterwards I was asked for my thoughts about the class, which I've included below. Also feel free to listen to the commentary from Chris and Wade.
For more information about signing up for the course, click here.
Steve
Twitter: @SteveTodd
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