This is a plan for studying for the DCUCI exam. It is currently a work in progress, and will be updated as I work through the material. It is mostly to help me stay organized and keep on track, but as there aren’t that many guides for the current version 6.0 of this exam (updated in 2017), I thought I would share this for anyone else to use as a starting point for their own studies.
The first place to start of course is with the exam topics. This doesn’t provide that much detail of what is needed to study, but the best place to start is with the administration guides. The exam is based on v2.x, but I am studying on 3.2 as it is the most current and will be most relevant to my real world implementations. Both versions have similar workflows, and I plan to do practice labs in both versions so I will be familiar with both.
Now, for the bulk of reading materials:
- Cisco UCS Manager Guides – list of all guides
- Cisco UCS Manager Administration Management Guide 3.2
- Cisco UCS Manager Network Management Guide, Release 3.2
- Cisco UCS Manager Server Management Guide, Release 3.2
- Cisco UCS Manager Storage Management Guide, Release 3.2
- Cisco UCS Manager Infrastructure Management Guide, Release 3.2
- Cisco UCS Manager Firmware Management Guide, Release 3.2
- Cisco UCS Manager System Monitoring Guide, Release 3.2
Although these guides are very through and contain tons of relevant information, they often provide lots of specific details on how to configure something with every available option, but don’t always include why, or simplified typical scenarios. For that reason, I also plan to also read Implementing Cisco UCS Solutions -Second Edition
I plan to do labs using the Cisco UCS Platform Emulator. I plan to use version 2.2 to prepare for the exam, and version 3.1 while reading the guides and for becoming more familiar with what I typically use at work.
A good (and free) resource for Network Engineers learning about storage: Introduction to Storage Area Networks I may not read this, as my background is with storage and compute infrastructure, but it may be useful for others.
CBT Nuggets are usually a good resource to bring some of the specific concepts together, however they still have not updated the course to for the new version of the exam. It appears that a lot of the course focuses on hardware which is no longer relevant, so I won’t be using CBT Nuggets unless they release a newer version of the course.
Good information from Yuri who has already passed the exam