Building a VCAP live exam lab environment (pt3) :: DCA550 environment

Previous posts:
Live Lab pt1
Live Lab pt2

This post is intended to help those building labs to study for the DCA550 exam. Note that each question lists the components required to complete that item.

The DCA550 exam is based on a vApp hosted by vCloud Director. While the vApp’s primary desktop is a Win2k8 R2 server named “ControlCenter” I would not recommend replicating that, rather use either your hosting machine’s desktop or the domain controler (pdc-sql) and just make sure Firefox, PowerCLI, Putty and WinSCP are on it.

The password for all accounts is vmware1!

There is one DNS/AD domain: dca.vclass.local

Four networks
172.20.10.x (main/management network)
172.20.11.x (other)
172.20.12.x (other)
172.20.13.x (NFS/iSCSI, other)

Five ESXi hosts (5.5.0 Build 1474528)
esxi01 172.20.10.51
esxi02 172.20.10.52
esxi03 172.20.10.53
esxi04 172.20.10.54
esxi05 172.20.10.55

Two vCenter servers
vcs01 172.20.10.94 (with VUM)
vcs02 172.20.10.95

One Windows 2k8 R2 server (AD/DNS/DHCP/NFS/NTP)
pdc-sql 172.20.10.93
.93 on all networks and has four command prompts running ping on each network to ensure the vmnics on each host “find” networks.

One LeftHand appliance
172.20.13.14

One vCOPS appliance pair licensed for Foundation

One vCO appliance (5.5.1 Build 1617225)
orch 172.20.10.83

several vMA appliances, one for an actual vMA platform, the rest for extra VMs
vMA 172.20.10.90

Note that only two hosts and one vCenter server is needed for practice, the extras are to ensure mistakes don’t end your exam.