You have picked the date for your Defence, where the Design submission is 60 days before. As the date approaches, you start counting days and estimating hours of effort to complete your submission. You start pulling all nighters to get things done; there do not seem to be enough hours in each day. On a regular basis, you will be tempted to give up; it is too much effort, but you have come so far, so you push through and make it happen.
List of articles in my VCDX Deep-Dive series (more than 70 posts)
The VCDX Program will be emailing you reminders and instructions for the submission process.
You need to ensure your design contains all of the requisite information specified in the Blueprint. It is very specific, but it is easy to misread or forget some sections. Your zipped submission of PDFs should contain similar documents and headings (for DCV):
- Fully completed VCDX Application
- Signed NDA page (scanned)
- Architecture Design
- Conceptual Model
- Virtual Infrastructure Management (Logical and Physical)
- Compute Resources (Logical and Physical)
- Network Resources (Logical and Physical)
- Storage Resources (Logical and Physical)
- Backup/Restore/Archive Resources (Logical and Physical)
- VM Resources (Logical and Physical)
- Security Resources (Logical and Physical)
- Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (Logical and Physical)
- Risk Analysis
- Bill of Materials
- Abbreviations
- References
- Logical and Physical Blueprints
- Implementation Plan
- Test Plan
- Configuration Guide
- Standard Operating Procedures
- Working URLs to reference links
- PDF copies of any reference material that is not available on the Internet
If your submission is not fully formed, it will either be returned to you for correction or rejected outright. If your submission is judged to have a material chance of succeeding, you will be invited to defend and provide your preferred date and time for the defence.
IMPORTANT: The Panelists only have a limited amount of time to review your submission; brevity, structure and economy of words are your friends. Make sure you time how long it takes to review your design; more than 4 hours, you have a problem.
CRITICAL: Your design submission will not be perfect, which is fine, it is merely your ticket to the Defence. The actual Defence is about you. However, your submission will be used to define your “Attack Surface.” The Panelists will use the weaknesses in your design to plan their questioning.
MAKE SURE YOU USE YOUR STUDY GROUP AND MOCK PANELS TO UNDERSTAND YOUR WEAKNESSES AND DEVELOP YOUR KNOWLEDGE TO PROVE YOU ARE MINIMALLY COMPETENT IN THESE AREAS.
vcdx133.com 
Nice guide. I´m still a bit confused regarding the Study Groups… do I actually need to form one, or is there an official group for us who have completed VCIX-NV and are going towards VCDX-NV? Thanks 🙂
There is no official group. For EMEA, Gregg Robertson (http://thesaffageek.co.uk, VCDX Candidate & EMEA vBrownbag Volunteer) is currently the unofficial organiser; reach out to him on Twitter to connect (@GreggRobertson). I have no idea how many current VCDX-NV candidates there are, but I would hope there is at least one you could form a group with. Cheers, Rene.
Great, thanks a lot Rene!!! I´ll contact him right now… Cheers
Great explanation, however is it necessary to have so many different documents, or the architecture design document can contain up to Refereces from the top of the list, and the rest of the documents such as implemenation plan, config guide, etc can be separate documents
You can do either, have one super document or break them up into separate documents, it is up to your personal preference. Thanks for taking the time to read the post.