I was able to sit the VMCA2022 course on Thursday, October 7th and Friday, October 8th.
The course was taken through HPE Learning and is a two-day course. The course is the entire day for the duration and is jam-packed with great content and labs.
My instructor was George Vish II, who was extremely great with the course teaching.
Overview
The course takes you through the new “Design Methodology” of Veeam and covers the following topics –
- Discovery
- Conceptual Design
- Logical Design
- Physical/Tangible Design
- Implementation & Governance
- Validation and Iteration
The course is a mix of lecture and lab work using the Veeam Activity Guide document, which lays out the methodology, Architecture principles, the Scenario you work on and all the required details, including questions with answers and charts that you fill in.
You are taught in the Discovery phase how to get things like –
- Requirements
- Security Requirements
- Constraints
- Assumptions
- Risks
- Other Information pertinent to the project
Labs – Group Work
During the labs (well, technically not hands-on with Veeam itself), you work in groups to fill out the charts in the document for each phase of your Scenario given. You populate all the information regarding discovery, sizing, etc. You also use some calculators that Veeam recommends –
These two sites come in handy for calculations. The other great thing with the document you use is that they have links that take you to the Wolfram Alpha site with example calculations, so you just need to change the values to what is relevant to your scenario – pretty slick!
As you work through the document, each person took the lead for a section so that you can get input from everyone in the group and fill in the charts, data, etc. I was lucky as the class I was in was just three students, so we all worked in one group, and the instructor joined for questions and acted as the customer in the scenario if we had more questions or needed a nudge/hint for things.
Overall
If any of you are considering doing the VMCA2022 exam, I could not recommend enough taking this course before you do. It is truly unique the work that has gone into this one compared to the older VMCA, and I know @haslund has done tremendous work with the course content.
I can genuinely say that this has helped me better understand how Veeam can and should be architected, which I will bring to my role at work. The remarkable document you get a copy of with all the answers, including the links to the calculation sites, recommendations, etc., makes this invaluable.
All I can say is to take the course as you won’t be disappointed!!
