None of our courses currently cover CEPH. I have been thinking about covering it in an upcoming Kubernetes series I am working on, but nothing is certain as of right now.

I'm sorry to hear that you weren't successful on the practice exam. There are usually two possible causes why someone does not pass an exam.

The first possible cause is that you didn't study effectively. Reading and listening to material is different than comprehending and retaining material. You've probably heard that before, and you took the effort to post here for help, so I'm going to assume that you studied an adequate amount and that is not the problem. Often times, the Kaplan exam is harder than the real exam. They do that to encourage you to really understand the topics and to do further research. At the end of the exam you should have had a chance to review your right/wrong answers and identify areas where you need to study more.

The second possible cause is that topics showed up on the practice test that weren't covered in our course. I designed the course to be objective complete and (as far as I am aware) it covers all of the topics that show up on the actual exam. I've personally taken each version of the exam so I know that the course covers every question I have seen, but the question pool is pretty big and there are new topics added from time to time. Would you mind sharing some of topics that popped up in the practice exam that you weren't able to answer?

Thanks Ronnie

@Jordan-Koupiaris ,

The reading view in Chromium-based Microsoft Edge is now known as "Immersive Reader".

The web page has to support Immersive Reader, and if it does, you will see the icon at the far right of the address bar.

You can turn on immersive reader by clicking the icon, or by tapping the F9 key.

Hello,

I have studied the material pretty thoroughly i and i feel confident on questions. However i do not feel so good about the labs. I have my test in two days time. Which labs should i focus on before the exam with such a short amount of time on my hands? It seems most of these labs are just about as long as the test! i unfortunately didn't plan for that which is my fault of course.

Any direction would be helpful!

Thank you,

Apple did not release updated training materials for macOS 10.15 so we did not film an update to the course. They haven't confirmed anything yet, but it looks like they will be discontinuing the certification track altogether. If that is the case, we will film custom content around macOS 11. For now, we are waiting to see what Apple announces. They usually drop new training materials in August. Last year was the first time they did not do that, so we are in uncharted waters on this one.

Hi @Jennifer-Turner ,
Can you tell me what artifact you are reading from? The actual book for the course or from one of our files provided in the course materials on the 2nd episode? We usually provide answer keys for all associated files and I , but I would like to help you figure this out. Can you share the file names or folders if it's in our files?

@Jared-Stokes-0
You very well may have the general knowledge necessary to pass the SysOps Associate exam except for one key point, "Cloud the AWS way". What I mean by that is AWS has some interesting philosophies on naming services that can be a little difficult to parse as well as has some recommended ways to create a cloud solution.

Something that helped me, though it does cost a little more money, was taking the Cloud Practitioner exam. By taking that exam, I was able to validate my basic understanding of the core services in AWS. I really got a confidence boost by taking (and doing well on) this exam. Afterward, I would spend some time reading through the Well Architected Framework as well as creating some basic solutions in AWS based on that document. (Such as creating a static website using S3 and Cloudfront).

Hope that helps.

@Ryan-Kular ,

I hope all is well. Traditionally, the performance issues that we attempt to address when deploying/using a database server arise from the limitations of the disk subsystem and our ability to access information quickly enough to allow for acceptable performance under load.

Databases can be heavy users of the disk(s) in/on the system(s) where they are installed, and as a result you need to plan for the type of usage that you are likely to experience over the lifetime of the database and it's usage.

The standard approach is to separate the data and logging functions of the database by installing and configuring them to use separate physical/virtual drives. This allows the system to use 1 drive for accessing/storing/processing data and any requests/needs around those activities, and a distinctly different drive for the logging that will take place as part of the use of the database.

If you choose to further optimize your configuration, you can decide to deploy with SSD drives instead of traditional HDD drives, as these will allow for much better read and response times for writes.

There are additional issues to consider, such as the amount of RAM (memory) that you are allocating to the VM/machine that will run the database(s). The simple rule is the more RAM, the better the performance, BUT the real secret is to understand that you need to have enough RAM available to load the entire database into memory so that it is able to run faster.

In addition, the real trick ultimately to database optimization is the data itself and the queries used to access it, along with the structure(s) used to store and work with the data across the database (the tables).

You can take a look at the URL's below for some basic introductory guidance on how to examine and optimize your data and queries as well as longer term performance monitoring to ensure everything stays healthy once you optimize:

How to optimize SQL Server query performance:
https://solutioncenter.apexsql.com/how-to-optimize-sql-server-query-performance/

How to Check and Improve Server Performance With SQL Query Optimization and Tuning:
https://www.dnsstuff.com/sql-server-query-optimization

SQL and Database Performance Tuning Guide and Checklist: Expert Tips:
https://www.dnsstuff.com/sql-and-database-performance-tuning-guide-and-checklist-expert-tips

Good Luck !!

Cheers,

Adam

P.S. ... Be on the lookout for the NEW VMware VCP7 course we are starting to film next week. It should be available in the library over the next 2 months or so as we finish it up. It will be FULLY UPDATED for the vSphere 7 release and the VCP-DCV7 exam that VMware has just released.

@Adam-Gordon this is good and great news. I'm taking the Ronnie VCA6 course to get the basics right being new to the vSphere world. I will certainly follow this new course that you are preparing.

if it is the "entire linux system" and space is not an issue, I always use "dd"... either to make a copy of the drive itself or a partition -----> another drive either in an .iso or just another mirror copy of the device completely swapable/bootable (Or into a virtual, a "little" tricky, but definitely doable). That way you have a working snapshot of the system that can be put back in place with the "dd" command again.... or possibly spun up on other system...OR spun up temporarily from the external drive using the boot override.

...nice for taking your home desktop with you on travel...