What is a Veeam Certified Architect and how do I become certified?

the presentation today is basically what is a veeam certified architects and how do i become certified and of course thank you so much for coming in to to watch you may notice this little qr code down in the corner if you're thinking hey would love more content on veeam certifications in some mix with maybe some vmware content every now and then that's not a bad place to maybe go and take a quick subscribe now if we haven't met before great to meet you my name is rasmus hasland i actually do work directly for veeam but

i'm sort of more in a general capacity i would say today um i've been at veeam since 2016 working on the education and certification team and so i've had the pleasure of doing some presentations trainings over the years i would also sort of put myself on the community learning pedestal involved in the vmware youth group here i also started the denmark music group for veeam although i passed it on to someone else when i joined beam i always think the user group should be run by the community not by the vendors themselves and in case

someone wants to connect of course hey would love to just hit me up on linkedin or twitter something like that unfortunately i'm not on myspace so that's not a good venue for that now i put a little uh agenda together for today five easy steps that will go through first we'll take the main topic here what is this beam certified architects and we'll talk a little bit about some design principles design methodology then we'll go and focus on the exam and at the end i would absolutely love to hear from you any and all questions

that you might have hit me up and we'll see what we can come up with on ansys if there's something i can't give you right away you know that means you've been asking more than fantastic questions and i'll just take a note on what they are and make sure to come back with an answer probably in the beam canada user group for on the community site or maybe chris can send it out we'll see so as mentioned veeam certified architect well what is this whole thing well it all starts this journey with attending a two-day

training and this is of course a instructor-led training i put on a slide itself a little um overview of the course itself there's a qr code you can scan if you want to easily go to the course description of course a more full description but basically in this class we will go take a scenario and intermix taking a look at how can we figure out the goals of requirement gathering infrastructure assessment so we analyze we collect all of this information about some fictitious customer and then we work as a team to go and design a

beam solution through a long series of exercises so we constantly learn a little bit implement it immediately in the um exercises and then we learn a little bit more we do it again in the exercise so this design sort of slowly but surely gets populated as we go now one of the things i personally think are very valuable is that we give you this sort of design template almost it's a word documents that the team is working to use of course it's slightly adjusted so that it works very easily for the scenario that we have

in the training but that being said you could use that for your own environment if you work for a customer or if your partner you could go and apply that to the customers that you encounter in the future now as a part of this we basically gather all of those requirements constraints and so on and we then go and turn this into a logical design we want to understand uh feature matching for example you say you have this requirement okay well what do i need from a feature standpoint but also being component standpoint to be

able to actually meet this and it's it's mainly about making sure that we've really thought about every single requirement we didn't let something slip through the cracks and let me say it sounds like i have some lists of course i'm not gonna forget something even in the training it's very common that at least one requirement will get missed by people and even when we've identified it and documented it and we start later on it's still very likely that somewhere in the process it will get lost that's okay because it's a training situation but hopefully we

won't do the same when we get out in the real world now once we produce our logical design and i'll talk a little bit more about that in in a bit but basically this is where we've done a lot of sizing we know which features which components and i don't really know do i need 10 proxies do i need 50 repositories or so and so much but i do nee know that i need someone so many terabytes petabytes of capacity and across all of my proxies i would need so and so many chords for example

then we want to turn this logical design into a physical design and this is always tricky so we don't deep dive on this in the training from a perspective of well you should go and buy this cisco cs3260 server because i don't even know if that's the current model right that that's the thing hardware components are fluid so we we take it a little bit more from the helicopter what kind of approach should you have which order would it make sense to go true from a forward process perspective and what should we keep in mind

as we go through our hardware selection then we take a look at implementation and governance because you're architects are you the one who should be doing the implementation the question is of course not could you go and do it maybe you could just because i'm the architect drawing some nice new bridge doesn't mean that i'm the one to now go out into the field and stay and then pour concrete onto the thing so we need to have some plan we need to have a handoff with whoever is actually going to do the implementation what do

we need to give them how do we make sure that they have the information if they encounter problems what is the agreed process from data then of course finally they've done some implementation things are hopefully working well but how do we validate our design we'll give you some different tips something just very low level is of course is to say well maybe there was a defined backup window okay so backups were supposed to finish in 12 hours maybe okay you sized everything based on the fact that that's going to be the window are they actually

finishing within the 12 hours or are we constantly going over time obviously not thinking of the first full because that's always a bit of a run but those daily runs of those recurring runs that we have are they fitting into the window the time frame we've agreed and if they are not we need to understand uh is it implementation fault is it a sizing fault did i forget something in the design maybe there's some permissions problem somewhere that's preventing the implementation from doing what it should and it's failing over to something else maybe you plan

to use direct nfs access and it's failing over to network mode via some one gig network instead of the 10 gig advanced network just to take some simple example now if you're thinking hey where where can i go and take this training here that's a qr code here again it takes you to the website for the uh education center locator and if it for some reason doesn't show you the correct country you can always uh click the little text link and adjust the country and it will show you the education centers for whatever location is

uh of course convenient for you now if we think about this role now i'm a vemma certified architect or i want to be well who who is this really for well it's always a little bit tricky i would say but anyone who's working with producing designs or beam solutions definitely should consider the certified architect certification so you could also think of it like if you find yourself maybe sizing components or even thinking about what kind of options do i have when i'm doing data protection well then maybe you didn't even think of it this way

but you were probably already involved in producing parts of a design or the entire design you just maybe didn't have sort of a formalized process that you were going through now in in the class here right we want to have this two-day training that's that's mandatory to be able to go and sit the exam but it's it's pretty 50-50 between the lecturing and hands-on exercises and when i say hands-on exercises like what what does that mean this is not some traditional lab exercise as you may have tried with other vendors where you get a remote

desktop into some system you follow some books just type this click that and so on no these are all digital paper-based exercises right like i said we have this word document you get a book digital or printed depending on what education send orders for you where this scenario is describes and in the training we've done discovery on your behalf discovery can be a little bit time-consuming so we've sort of set it up in a way that you say well your your colleague has already done this for you just in the interest of time and then

you get this almost endless list of questions that someone else has been asking fortunately also all of the answers and you want to analyze this along with the information provided from the customer your colleague took meeting notes you want to look at those as well the customer gave you information about the infrastructure then we want to start making sense of all of that stuff but when we want to start passing all of this information we might all have different ideas about what would be the right way to do it and so sometimes you might have

multiple routes to maybe get to the same end destination but it could also be that we end up at different destinations now i'm not here to say that hey there is only one possible outcome whenever you're working with a customer because i i don't think that that's a fair way to say that being said if we've all collected the same requirements the same constraints the same information about the um scenario that's the infrastructure that the customer has then we should end up with relatively similar designs so we definitely want consistency and this is where taking

the time to go through the training but also of course studying for the exam starts to pay off because it's really critical i apply this in my daily wet life but also at work i want consistency and here we definitely want a well-defined process for creating designs because what is the alternative i've seen this happen uh when i worked as a consultant myself in the past many times ah you know i open my drawer and i take a look and i think yeah you know this customer it's probably relatively similar from a infrastructure perspective to

this other customer that i'm working now and we sort of just almost searched to replace some names and tweak it here and there and then you know that's great that's not really making a design right when we go into something like this we're trying to make it a one size fits all and while maybe that's good for lean dream spandex suits it doesn't really fit everyone when it comes to i.t so instead we want this one clearly defined but also repeatable process and that's what we're teaching in the course another process that we talk about

has should say four overarching design principles and of course a well-defined design methodology why don't we try and take a closer look at the design principles first and then we'll come over and talk about the methodology afterwards so the design principles little overview here right we basically want to keep it simple we're looking for simplicity we want something that's secure by design flexibility flexible in iteration and we want high value likes a good value right we want to we don't want to pay a lot for something that's not really worth anything that's that's just where

we feel cheated somehow right so if we take a little bit of a closer look at each of these four principles then we can maybe try and define them a little bit better and the first one simplicity it worked in iot i'm becoming an old man here then you may as also like i have even from my early days heard of the kiss principle right we want to keep it simple and then there's that extra s at the end i'm not going to go into in this presentation even if we go far back in time

even albert einstein was pushing his principle right keep things simple now it doesn't matter how clever we are we want to produce a design that's as simple as requirements and the constraints of my customer allows so you could say okay but what is a requirement well that's of course always a good question when we think of requirements in our design they are based on the wants and the needs of the customer so these need and wants must be identified by the architect making the design the issue of course is that they are often communicated by

my target customer in some non-technical and many times in vague terms if we try and take a little non-iit related example i could tell you you're now designing some product for me okay i could tell you uh here product should not be too heavy and should be easy to open uh it should look high-tech okay fantastic now we have some design team looking to convert these wands and knees to some technical design requirements okay so we could say oh mass of product must be between half a kilo and point seven kilos maybe uh so so

then it shouldn't be too heavy then the force required to open this product should be less than 5 newtons or maybe this surface must reflect at least 80 of incident light to make it look high-tech somehow okay of course when things turn into beam it's so easy to start thinking just about the technical requirements but it's really important that we also think about business requirements right it could be something as easy as well do we actually have people who can operate this product like we don't have availability to go and send people on a training

because actually as it turns out we have one person and that's also the guy who goes to fill up the princess with new paper when they run out so if he's gone for five days we can't print anything after day one that's already a problem hopefully that's usually not the case but maybe we can find someone who can come and fill up that printer for that one day if that's what's what really is the issue here if we think about constraints in stats what are constraints i think in an easy way to think about this

and i see many people get confused about constraints typically we think about constraints as a limitation something that i can't do just keep in mind it doesn't have to be something that's actively preventing you from doing something it could be something that potentially is limiting you but you don't know if it's going to happen yet right if i tell you my internet bandwidth is 10 gigabits per seconds sound like a lot but what if it turns out after doing all of the math that i need 20 gigabits per second to make offside copies well then

certainly it is a constraint so once we notice certain things that could maybe or maybe not limit us we could always put them in as a constraint so another way to think is constraints are conditions that need to happen for the project to be successful and design constraints help narrow the choices we have available when we create a project obviously i'm trying to put a somewhat positive spin on constraints but it's just something we have to work with it doesn't have to be something very negative we talked about a non-i.t example on requirements we could

do something similar here with the constraints so let's say we we're having some dinner party here some friends i've assigned budgets of course right you should always have a budget when you talk to customers and say they don't have a budget why are we having this conversation right if you don't have any money to spend there is nothing for me to work with use what you have already so maybe my budget here is that i don't want to spend more than 40 bucks on all of my groceries okay so maybe we have a friend julie

let's say she's a vegetarian doesn't eat meat so i need to consider keeping meat off the menu maybe joe has an allergy to peanuts so it's important that we don't have any nuts products with nuts come home from the grocery store maybe we have usa he has some gluten intolerant so you want to make sure we have some options for jose as well and although this event is startup fun friday night it's probably already filled with constraints that we have to start thinking about so at first in the example any food in the entire world

could be on my menu but then you remember the budget and your choices are already becoming smaller so like i said design constraints they can feel like negative things sometimes but they are basically here to help shape the project to fit the exact needs of my customer and of course in this example here the result at the end of all of our considerations will be that some meal will suit me and all of my guests we go to the next one on security or secure by design well security in our design should be considered as

far as the requirements allow or in many cases even demands but what does that really mean we could take some examples right we for example would probably want to minimize our attack surface area so the principle of minimizing attack surface area restricts functions that devices on the network are allowed to access typically to reduce potential vulnerabilities if you think in beam terms you could use some hardened repository once it's set up you disable ssh right that's already a minimized attack surface there as opposed to something that's available on the network i think most customers to

a certain degree use a volume at least uh default settings okay well if you think of a job or anything else often times in meme you'll see a button save as default why not make sure that we have secure defaults right so the idea here the principle is that we want secure by default and this makes basically sure that we have strong security rules for which shows are allowed to be placed on which networks uh how close these firewalls should be if you have service accounts well how often do we need to update passwords how

complex should they be and so on and if we don't think about that service accounts of course we want to operate with the principle of least privilege right the the service account user here should have the minimum set of privileges required to perform a specific task it's the reason to create a service account veeam in your visander and then assign it full administrator rights unless what you're looking to do is never have to think about anything regarding missions of course until that day someone maybe abused it to do something that it shouldn't goodness that you

have fracking of which you said was the bad news is it could only do those things because you allowed it to go and do it why not follow the actually quite good documentation there is and just only give the service account exactly the permissions that it needs but when we start applying this you might have uh based on all of your um analytics decided okay i'm going to let's say use a repository i've narrowed it down based on requirements two options which one is more secure boom then that's the one we're gonna pick or which

one is the more simple one the next one we'll go with oftentimes the simple insecurity sounds like deviating things but i would say when we make complex things that's actually often times where it is not necessarily so uh secure as it could have been or it becomes very difficult to manage which again is where people oftentimes start cutting corners which is not really the best to be ranked if we continue a little bit to flexibility yeah then what do we have well it's definitely a step-by-step iteration that we're going through here so we've with vision

we've we've gathered all of these requirements now it's maybe time to actually go in and create it and then we definitely favor a iterated method of development here meaning we want flexibility so that we avoid these expensive uplift upgrades so that we can instead easily scale out without having to do a complete solution redesign instead we make it a sign where we have building blocks if you make a proxy building block you make a repository building block if you need more storage boom you drop in an extra building block you need to process your backups

faster you plop in an extra proxy building block and we can keep adding these we don't have design decisions that are locking us down to some state where the solution can't possibly be expanded in the future now as we go forward right at the beginning we've defined some scope hopefully we've done good discovery we've understood what we need to cover but then later on actually additional parts of the infrastructure does become part of the scope maybe we went out and purchased a competitor and now we need to merge their infrastructure item infrastructure into ours and

also protect it right so suddenly you have this blink big huge chunk that you also want to protect okay well do we now do a big redesign well hopefully not right we just need to add more building blocks that's definitely the plan at least lastly we had the high value right it's one of these cost benefits situations and if we look at the should i say definition maybe of of cost benefits it's basically a analysis of pros and cons of some given situation or course of action to determine the downsides compared to the upsides right

so basically we're looking to make sure that for example this principle holds the cost so that we end up providing a solution that doesn't exceed the utility or benefit to the customer right you don't want to spend 10 million dollars protecting something that's 1 million worth right that just doesn't make any sense at all now our architect of course is gonna sum up potential rewards expected from some situation or action and then subtract total cost associated with taking that action sure it would be nice to store all of your backups on some speedy nvme storage

right i would love to do that but what justification do we have from our requirements and constraints and sometimes we have other costs that can be maybe tricky to include that could be indirect costs including electricity maybe overhead costs for management of the solution some intangible costs like impact on my employees or delivery times or things like that because maybe you want something it takes ages to show up you have to then renew the contract of the existing solution for one extra year then you have a cost right there that maybe weren't really part of

the budget so going a different way might end up being cheaper or even though the equipment was more expensive than you were initially planned it's still cheaper than paying for that renewal cost or whatever it is that we're looking at so these are the sort of overarching design principles and we want to keep those in mind at every step of the way if you're ever sitting thinking well i have multiple options here let's take a look at these four principles apply them make sure that we use those as a guide for making the final decision

on what will we suggest and recommend here the next step becomes the design methodology and it's a six-step methodology here we essentially start off with discovery right we want to figure out what you have uh what's in in the scope who are the stakeholders um and this this this is no easy process and i i definitely want to make it clear here when we talk about discovery and we look at this slide here you you might think well okay i do discovery i'm done then i go to conceptual no it's extremely rare that you can

ever say i'm done with discovery plus at the beginning of the project maybe you only have one single stakeholder clearly someone engaged you in this project whoever it could be then we go and talk to this person okay well what are the business critical mission critical applications what else do you have we start asking the why question who is the owner of that oh so this is someone who's a put that down on the list then we have questions for that person so the more we ask typically the more we find out at some point

hopefully we we've gotten almost everything or ideally everything that we need but then we want to make sure that we have the right information so then we maybe narrow the questions down a little bit more to be maybe more specific and eventually it basically becomes closed questions i understand that you have done you want to do so and so is that correct yes or no okay well then we need to have a conversation to find out where where did this go wrong don't forget about competing stakeholders who might have different opinions on what do we

what they do they want to do and retention and how things should be done and so on very common situation well then at some point you'll have to figure out whose budget are we spending and probably that's the person who will be making the final call on some of those decisions to be frank but discovering something that that could take a long long time and you will come back to it then we have the conceptual parts this is basically where we try to take all of that big chunks at least initially a big chunk of

information from discovery we start making tables documentation what are identified requirements identify constraints maybe there's information that we realized we haven't been able to get maybe they don't know what their change grade is maybe that's an assumption just keep in mind assumptions you want to eliminate them assumptions are basically best effort guesses that we're trying to do here and we don't want to do a design based on my guess maybe i make good guesses and you know fantastic but what about those times when i turned out to be wrong but surely over time that will

happen at least once so what we then do of course is to go back to the customer and say hey i need to get this information sometimes they'll say well we just don't know we just can't possibly give you this information we don't know we have no way of getting it okay well then you basically have to say okay i need this as a variable in the calculations that i'll be doing as a part of your design can we agree on a assumption based on my experience that we'll use a value of 15 or whatever

it is then we document that we can't get the information it becomes an assumption if we get the information it's no longer an assumption it's confirmed data assumptions should be unconfirmed data basically we move through all of this once we build all of this it's a good idea to kind of make a eye level diary and sometimes people they get all excited oh yes now now to make something pretty here just a reason to deep dive and you don't want to put like 1000 beam stencils oh then we are protecting these vms over here there's

a thousand of those ten clusters no just make a diagram it's like okay we have virtual machines here that's already more than enough information we have maybe some physical workloads maybe i have something else that needs to be protected like a database specifically maybe it's an oracle sql if there's like specific named applications that you really want to call out you can put them there next up we might have multiple locations well you know you have to get a meme backup so so if you already know where it could make sense to put it you

can put it there but what about these backups you probably based on those requirements have identified that in that location we need to have a backup and then i need to make a copy to that other location then people are like oh okay they use public cloud it's it's azure it's google cloud it's aws whatever service provider cloud connect so i'm gonna write clock no you didn't make that decision yet right just write cloud and then put the backup there and you don't have to decide that it's going to object storage or cloud repository or

something like that it's just a backup will go to that location and this is as high level as we need to keep it that's all perfectly fine later when we get to the next section if we go to logical now we'll start to make actual decisions will i use object stores okay great so i've decided that i will use that well now i also know that for example i need a scalar backup reputatory just as a example maybe you have some requirement for immutability okay so then maybe it becomes cloud maybe it becomes hardened depos

depends a little bit here but it could also be you end up with tape right so there's just so many options but now we have to start making decisions let's say you want to use block storage and the customer has some budget constraint here they want to spend the minimal amount okay so that means we have to think in how can i avoid storing more data then i have to it has to match exactly to the requirements maybe you want to use 3fs xfs or something like that then we have to write something like down

i i need log cloning fast learning on this repository just to give you ideas but now that we've made those decisions in the logical phase i can continue logical to size every single component how much bandwidth do i need to send it offside well i don't know because i didn't yet calculate how much the backups are going to be and because i didn't do that i don't know how big these incrementals are going to be i need that to size the bandwidth so it makes sense to have a defined order of what are we going

to do here and in this training of course we give you all of that information as well a little clip hanger yeah but starting off with those backups probably not a bad place to start now once we've gone through component by component based on the features and corresponding components that we want to use then we can go and size those relevant components at the end now let's say i've decided i needed a 100 proxy code well now it's time to make a physical design here i have to think about things like well are we going

to combine certain roles like should i put my repository and the proxy on one box well maybe the answer is easy because let's say you decided earlier that you were going to use a hardened repository well then we should know the answers already no because they can be co-located so now you have to split them what if you didn't do that then maybe you decided to to put them on the same maybe you decide to split them anyway but we have to make some decisions here on that then of course we start looking at things

like well how much storage did i need in total well how much can i realistically put into one box okay well then that becomes my building block how much cpu does each building block get memory and denier can start to say i need so on so many building blocks for repository proxy and so on then we get to the implementation governance part well here you have to start thinking would there certain settings because sometimes people get confused about design and implementation let's say there was a requirement when you send your backups to public cloud object

storage that the traffic had to be encrypted okay well the traffic is encrypted by default so no problem but what if they said the backups they had to be stored encrypted oh if there was no requirement to start encrypted on-prem then obviously i'm not going to do that because that's extra performance load you could decide to do it anyway secure by design that's that's fine but if you decided to do on-prem encryption then you don't want to put the checkbox to make sure that you get encrypted a second time when you send them out but

if you didn't store them on-prem encrypted then you have to check that box to make sure that you meet the requirement but there wasn't a design decision that we're making here there was a requirement that then leads down to the implementation team they have to remember to go and put this and they might forget about it so we would definitely want that one small detail among many many potential pieces of decisions to be a part of that hand-off who's responsible for what yeah this is this needs to be very very clear then we have that

it's validation iteration like i said we've now done the implementation are we meeting our backup windows are we having errors uh do we have a new scope that's been adjusted do we need to do a new iteration well then we go back to discovery we run through the whole cycle one more time so it's a process that seems never ending but when do you come back for this validation and iteration you gotta give these people a little bit of time it has to have a chance to run for some time maybe three six months down

the line it depends a little bit on how long do we need for equipment to show up all the stuff like that you might be thinking all right this sounds fantastic i would love to sit on this training well i'm happy to hear that you've been excited about that how did i even become certified well there is a exam as always yeah now before i dive into the details of the exam itself uh just in case someone didn't know it all of the veeam exams are taken through pearson view which you may have used to

take sames from other windows now a little bit depending on how those vendors work you may have been able to go down to your local test center and they just looked you up in the system and they booked it for you immediately with veeam you can't technically take the exam before you've been authorized now to get authorized it's actually a two-step process step one is take the training we talked about that step two you go to the beam website beam.com bmt you log in using the email that you used when you signed up the training

you click veeam certifications the bmca tab and then there's going to be under the schedule your exam tab a exam manage your exam button and when you click that this is what the first time this is when the veeam system sends that authorization over to pearsonview it's the same for the vmse exam now maybe that sounds complicated it's literally like three clicks now once that's been done you can schedule it online you can call psnu you can talk to your local test center everything is fine every now and then i talk to someone and they're

kind of confused why they they can't do it they just need to go and press the button that's that's usually what it is of course there's different situations maybe the education center forgot to report to your your class for some reason okay that that can happen but thankfully that's a very very minimal thing here okay so on this exam it's who is it that can go and set this well obviously the course you could you could go and attend this architecture and design course but could someone else also do it well in the past we

had a course called veeam certified engineer advanced design and optimization if you took that course in the previous 12 months or so then it's also possible to go and schedule the new exam you could potentially do the old one but it's it's uh it's gonna go end up live so you might want to do the new one instead or if you've taken the whole course past the old exam you are beam certified architect version one then of course we also let you upgrade no problem at all now once you sit the exam what should we

expect here well it's nothing overly difficult um you may have heard about all exams where we had endless amounts of math and formulas and stuff to memorize we don't have that on the new exam what you'll be present with equal to the old one is 40 different questions we give you 90 minutes however a time extension of 30 minutes is offered if the exam is delivered in a language different than the local language that's a complicated way to say if you are in a country where the local language is not english you will get a

30-minute extension because the exam is only available as of right now at least in english who knows maybe will be localized in the future what do you need to pass the exam you need a score of 70 ideally better right 70 means there was 30 that we missed missed opportunity right now the exam gives you a case study and there are multiple case studies in the system so should the unfortunate thing happen that you fail don't be discouraged about that but please also don't be surprised that you will get a completely different case study when

you take it the next time so trying to memorize information from the exam is basically useless rather go back look at the process try to understand what was it that i somehow misunderstood in identifying all of this information and then apply that to the new case study the case study is basically going to be your friend throughout the entire exam every single question that you get the answer you pick as the correct one must be related to that case study okay the questions themselves are typically not very difficult if they were stand alone but because

you have to apply them to the case study you have to understand and process all of that information that they have now on the exam itself there are different sections i have listed an amount here we have discovery 25 of the exam conceptual design also 25 logical design 25 and then we have physical tangible 15 deployment and evaluation 10 so you can see there's a pretty good overlap here with the course all of the content uh that you will be tested on will be from this course or the regular configuration and management training so if

you're a veeam certified engineer you only need to worry about the new content here now one important thing to know is during the exam you get the case study but there are also five different tabs i didn't list them out on the slide but i'm gonna tell you the first one is a executive overview basically sort of a summary of what infrastructure issues requirements do they have second tab solution concepts a high level description of veeam's proposed solution tab number three existing technical environment before anything mean so basically some specification of what they have then

we take a look at the existing technical environment so what does that look like from a technical perspective we look at business requirements and finally technical requirements that they might have now what is very near and dear to my heart is doing the best i can to help people prepare and ideally pass the exam the first time everyone is able to pass this exam and it's also definitely doable to do it in the first attempt but some study needs to be invested and i can say i've already been contacted by more than one person this

exam went live i think august 2nd 2021 and i've already been contacted by more than one person who told me that not until almost the very end of the exam did they realize there were multiple tabs with information this is pretty clear in the system but regardless even if somehow you're stressing you felt it wasn't clear it's also described in the exam guide document right important thing is don't be surprised know what you're going into to me i think they didn't read the exam guide and that's a big miss because this is the document that

tells you what should you expect to be tested on if you don't know what to be tested on you're basically going in blind hoping to wing it essentially and that's that that's maybe not the best start point to part a to pass a certification exam another a good tip i can give you on the exam is that questions do not relate to each other let me make a fake example here this is not something from the real exam i i want to make that absolutely clear up front so it's it's maybe not even slightly maybe

very exaggerated but i just want to make what i'm talking about abundantly clear here so let's say you have a case study and it tells you that the customer wants 14 days of retention so you're like okay boom two weeks of retention done you then are presented with some question that states the customer has changed their minds and the retention requirement is now seven days and the actual question then ask you something about how this is affecting sizing okay no problem you understand you you reply great three questions later you're plowing through everything everything's going

great you get a question and now you're confused because the next question says how much retention does the customer want and your answer options are 7 days 14 days 21 days 31 days now it's very tempting to answer seven days because you just learned from the other question that they changed their mind they changed what's in the case study seven days would be the wrong answer because in the exam guide we are very clearly told questions do not relate to each other you should always go up to the case study to find the correct information

now like i said just to be completely clear i'm making a very big deal about this in this clear example here beam is not trying to trick you on the exam somehow right i just made this over the top example to try and get the the point across here uh that definitely there's no intention of anything like that so that's why i said it's a fake example but i think most people can understand the point here um it's it's listed as like one line in the exam guide but i think most people they don't really

know what to expect from that piece of information now i i'm thinking what else could i tell you so is there something else that you need to know yes now you don't have to be experts here in the guide it says some technologies are not specifically taught in any of the trainings they still expect candidates to have some familiarity with them for contextual reasons for example oracle would be on what is army what is clustering microsoft sql server because we don't teach you about these specific technologies in any of the trainings but we expect you

to have an idea that rman is oracle's recovery manager tool that is sort of the official tool to do backups and recovery and maybe even know that veeam has a plugin for that you don't need to know anything about the plugin per se but like i said for contextual reasons if we talk about oracle i'm in we don't want someone to sit there thinking i don't know what to tell you never heard about that before i didn't realize i was supposed to look up what r man means or what is oracle clustering so now you

know and you should have known before you went into the exam i didn't prepare too much more content because i also wanted to make sure that in case some people had questions that they had a chance to go and ask them and i also know put it in the chat there's a little survey there so um it's definitely very important here that we we go and take a look but if there are some questions i would absolutely love to hear from you you