The road to VCDX, Part 3: Get challenged!

So, it has been a while since the last post around the road to achieving the VCDX certification. There are a couple of reasons for that of which I will explain some of them in this post.

The main reason for my absence is that I have been working quite hard to write my design. And that has been a great challenge (and still is).

The project that I have been working on in 2015 (on which my design is based) was a VMware Professional Services based project. This means that the documentation that I had to use for that project was based on the VMware PSO delivery kit. The kit itself contains a lot of template documentation, visio drawings, installation documentations, slide decks, etc and is a great help to guide you through a project. But the kits also have a major downside. And that downside is that they lack a good story line. I found that out when doing a first presentation of my design to the study group I’m in. The design itself looked good, but it was quite hard to guide the group through my journey. So I got roasted.. 🙁

So I started over, this time from scratch.

As I mentioned in the earlier posts, the road to VCDX is also about becoming a better architect by learning through the process. And so I did. The most important thing I learned in the past couple of weeks is to create a story line so your readers can easily understand your design and the process you went through to create it.

As an example, the main topics in your storyline could look like this:

Project definition
Conceptual overview
Use cases overview
Desktop design
Applications
User Management (including AD)
Horizon View design
vSphere integration (including cluster design)
Storage design
Network design
Security
BCDR Design
Maintenance and Monitoring

This story line is becoming the backbone of my design and as it looks now, I’m already 60% done with still a couple of weeks to go before submission. So advice number one: create a story line and stick to that line.

Advice number two based on the above experience: get challenged on a regular basis by peers or study groups to avoid building your complete design and get it roasted just close before the submission date.

I am aiming for a submission date at the end of August 2016, so still lots of work to do..

Continu reading: Part 4: Discipline