I’ve never done the VCAP5-DCA exam before so I don’t know what questions will be asked. That said, looking at the various topics in the blueprint I came up with some activities which I interpret to be within the scope of the exam. I intend to go through these (and other) activities during my study time.

• Perform all the tasks below without an outage for a particular business critical VM. This VM must have no downtime during these maintenance operations.
• A client calls you in and asks you to configure auto-deploy for stateless deployment of some 10 new hosts (DHCP has been configured for these hosts as 10.1.15.20 through 10.1.15.29) in an HA cluster called “DEV-TEST-clus” to match their existing three ESXi servers (which are installed to local drives). The 10 new hosts need a non-standard driver for a particular piece of hardware (one can use a driver update for this). The client uses a Windows based vCenter and does not currently have auto-deploy configured.
• You have been asked to deploy a vMA by your boss to allow him to configure various tasks which he will setup to be run by cron against the vSphere estate. Deploy and configure the vMA so that sample commands can be run from the vMA command line against the vCenter server and the ESXi hosts in the environment.
• You find that you often need a list of all the VMs, the hosts they are on and their powered up state for a report you write. Create a PowerCLI command/script to provide only this information.
• Configure a central log host for the ESXi servers for your environment. Use vCLI to configure the hosts to log to this logging host. No more than 20MB of logs should be stored and no log file should be bigger than 2MB.
• Deploy UMDS. Configure a baseline for ESXi 5.0 hosts for security updates only. Verify this and export the baseline using PowerCLI
• You need to configure 20 identical hosts with a new vSwitch using two unsed vmnics. You need to create the following port groups: dmzWEB-v10 (VLAN10), dmzAPP-v20 (VLAN20) and dmzCRM-v30 (VLAN30). dmzWEB-v10 is to use load balancing based on originating portID, dmzAPP-v20 is to use source-MAC hash load balancing and dmzCRM-v30 needs to use explicit failover order. The higher number vmnic should be primary and the lower numbered one being standby and failback should be disabled. The dmzWEB-v10 port group needs promiscuous mode enabled due to the way the application works. The dmsAPP-v20 port group should have it’s traffic limited to an average and peak bandwidth of 2Mb/s with a burst size of 5000KB. A VMkernel port should be created on VLAN 50 to be used for FT traffic only (the IP addresses should be 10.10.30.20/24 through 10.10.30.39/24). A portgroup dmzFW should be created with default settings and configured for VGT.
• Configure PVLANs on an existing dvSwitch, using a command line tool if possible, so that the exact commands can be put in the RFC. VLAN 101 is the promiscuous VLAN, VLAN 102 is the isolated VLAN and 103 and 104 are the community VLANs.
• Create an HA/DRS cluster (only HA to be enabled and using the default configuration) called “FIN-CLUS1”. Add two hosts, “fin-host1” “fin-host2” to the cluster.
• Collect IO stats for a VM for approximately 5 minutes from VM power on (to capture boot-up I/O statistics) and export them to a CSV stored on the vCenter server. Maybe boot up into the VM BIOS to ensure all the IOs involved in the bootup process are captured.
• You notice that a LUN is missing from a host yet the storage admins have confirmed that the SAN and storage array is configured correctly and that the host can see other LUNs on the array. Other hosts can see the LUN. Explain what needs to be checked and then reconfigure the host to be able to use the LUN.
• Once the LUN is correctly visible to the host, you notice that it is not flagged as an SSD capable LUN. Configure the LUN so that all hosts correctly identify the LUN as an SSD LUN.
• Migrate the business critical VM mentioned above onto this new SSD LUN. Ensure that this LUN is a preferred LUN for datastore heartbeating.