HOL for VCAP?

Is it possible to use the VMware HOL to pick up the necessary skills and experience for the VCAP-Deploy exam, or would a home lab be the better option for studying for the Deploy exam? Has anyone just used the HOL for preparing for VCAP?

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Comments

dave330i

I used HOL for all my 6 prep.

GBAKER2204

Great to know, thank you so much for your reply.

Essendon

Another vote for the HOLs.

GBAKER2204

Thanks Essendon.

techfiend

HOL labs don't have much content for the VCAP6 Deploy anymore. What I did was use vJenner's study guide and the old HOL 6.0 labs from the archive.

The goods: You'll test in the same looking environment, but slower and more limited, tweak the display to your liking; you don't need hardware/vmware workstation to study.

The bads: I couldn't setup auto-deploy; I couldn't find VUM, VDP or Replication appliances installed, these are part of the exam blueprint.

If you have 16GB+ RAM you can trial vmware workstation and build a nested esxi environment to study what the HOL's are missing. It will take some time to deploy but will be much more responsive than HOL.

blargoe

I would do the HOLs, but nothing replaces the blood, sweat and tears from setting it all up from scratch.

GBAKER2204

Thanks to all that responded. Will see how far I can get on the HOLs and if I find anything useful post up the labs used for the blueprint sections.

In the midst of costing/completely rebuilding my lab from scratch hence the question.

joelsfood

VCAP6-DCV Deployment Exam Simulator - Solutions4Crowds

techfiend

The exam sim joelsfood posted is two big thumbs up! I'd suggest taking it 5-7 days before you test to give an idea what you should focus on studying the rest of the way.

Deathmage

I'd finally admit the HOL is better, even though the lab has a place in my heart.

Upgraded the home-lab in June with a QNAP TS-831XU-RP and Netgear M4300-8X8F and after I did it, I was like O.o.... it is nice having a RAID 10 12TB array with a mirror SSD cached on 10G (for PLEX) for the tri R710's and tri R610's but it's a royal ***** powering this thing up when the compute and edge clusters are running and my TP-LINK Smart plug saying I'm using 1200 watts an hour, I blew my circuit breaker 5 times so far.

Can finally say that yes the home-lab was nice for DCV land, but now that I'm doing NV w/ the compute and edge, and now lately me feeling the need for a smaller "remote" datacenter, I'm really pondering if it's really worth it give my utility free $$$...