I have just got back from my VMWare VCP510 exam. I did it at Global Knowledge in central London. Just want to put down some thoughts and hopefully can help someone out there who is still preparing for this exam.
Overall, I think the exam experience is quite positive, although I was nervous as hell! I arrived at the test centre about 1 hour before it started (as my lovely wife always jokes about me being super on time just like a German lol). It calms me down knowing I will not be late by sitting down across the street in a starbucks sipping my soya Latte looking through the exam blueprint once more while listening to some Jack Johnson song. Went over to the test centre 15 minutes before the exam starts, got my picture taken, signed few papers and finally sit down in front of the exam computer. I recommend doing the survey at the beginning because it gets me into the reading mood. The time is quite tight as you have 90 minutes to go through 85 questions but I managed to have about 10 minutes at the end of the exam to review a few that I am not sure of.
Without breaching my NDA, let me give you some advice on passing the exam.
1) Build a Lab!!! After experiencing first hand, I realized after the exam how valuable my home lab has been towards me passing this exam. (Check out my previous blog about my home lab). Try everything you can possibly can on your lab, enable/disable different features to see the difference it does to your cluster, VMs, hosts etc. Deploy as many vSphere components as you can such as vCenter Server Appliance, vApps, vDR 2.0, Web client. Click through anything you can click on vSphere client GUI to familiar yourself with where things are and different ways of doing the same task.
2) Have the VCP5 Exam Blueprint with you at all time. Read through them and all the recommended documentations.
3) Make up as many scenarios as possible and try it out in your lab!! During the exam, I got few questions that I actually tried myself in my lab just to see how things work and I was really happy to see those questions :) Things that I've tried in my lab:
- create different types of virtual vSphere hosts i.e. ESXi 4.1 and ESXi 5 to see differences- create virtual iSCSI (OpenFiler) targets and NFS (OpenFiler) shares to see the different features of each type of storage. Make sure you know the differences between VMFS3 and VMFS5!
- create vSS and vDS to see the different settings, create port groups, add/remove vmknics to see the effect, etc, etc, etc.
4) Take notes as you practice, so you have a summary of things to review before the exam, helped me a lot as I tend to forget about things fairly quickly unless I do it few times. (getting old...)
5) Take your time and read details when you install ESXi 5.0, vCenter Server, vSA, vDR etc as the installation process actually gives you a lot of valuable informations. When you click through while using vSphere client, read any messages, warnings given by vSphere client, lots of good information on there.
5)IF you choose to use any of the brain dump sites which I don't recommend doing as they are misleading and might waste lots of your precious time, do not take anything for granted and verify yourself and DO NOT try to remember any of the answers they give you. It's still a heated debate on if it's right to use these brain dump sites so I won't get into it too much. It's your own choice. Do it in your own lab as it will be come your own knowledge.
6)Sleep well and relax before the exam.
7)Time management during the exam: I kept myself from spending way too much time on a question, if it is a multiple choice, I use elimination first and most of the time, you can narrow your answers down a lot. Personally I try not to change any answers I put down before as most of the time your first answer is the correct one.
8) Read blogs about other people's VCP 5 experiences/tips/guidelines helped me a lot just to see what to expect during the exam, the following are the ones I read and I highly recommend them:
Simon Long - The SLOG
Scott Vessey
TheSaffaGeek
9) Couple of great books that you might have already know about would help you with VCP and future VCAP/VCDX preparation:
vSphere 5 Clustering Techinical Deepdive by Duncan Epping/Frank Deeneman
Mastering VMware vSphere 5 by Scott Lowe
VMware vSphere PowerCLI Reference: Automating vSphere Administration by Luc Dekens, Alan Renouf, Glenn Sizemore and Arnim van Lieshout
10) Google is your friend!!!
Hope it helps you even a little bit by reading this post. Good luck in your exam and most importantly have FUN!
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