Passed my VCP5!!

JohnnyBiggles

Took the course a few months ago, read a lot and labbed a lot and finally passed! Fortunately, my company has hardware I could play with which helped a lot. Without an actual environment, it would have been much tougher I believe. It was tougher than I expected anyway and to me, a lot of the questions were very tricky or borderline unfair but in the end I'm a VCP!! Now itz breaktime... then on-to-the-next-one

Essendon

Congrats! Does next one mean the DCA or the VCP-IaaS or something completely different?

JohnnyBiggles

Essendon wrote: »

Congrats! Does next one mean the DCA or the VCP-IaaS or something completely different?

Well, I might keep the 'vMomentum' up and go for the VCAP DCA. But I actually had just started working on the CCNP before I found out my company was setting this up so i'm gonna get back to that also. I wanted to take a crack at the CISSP too, so I'll have to see.

I notice you're a VCAP yourself. Any suggestions or advice on that? How difficult is it compared to the VCP? Timeframe? What did your path to VCAP look like? Sorry for all the questions, I just would appreciate some guidance and experience. And thanks!

Essendon

I highly recommend doing the DCA if you work on vSphere daily. The amount of stuff you learn is astonishing, really. I worked on vSphere before I took the DCA, and I after I've done it I am able to look at vSphere from a different angle, if you will.

I found the DCA "easier". Easier because I labbed the hell out of it. Dunno if you know about the DCA, but it's done on a live lab, you have 26 tasks to complete and about 70% of the tasks you'll have are what a senior(ish) vSphere admin would do on a daily basis. I am the kind of person that does practical stuff better than memorize a bunch of things.

Timeframe: I started studying for it in October, then slacked off on the study in November because of work. I started a new job in early December and focused on it more than the study. Started in earnest again in Feb, really ramped it up in March and finally took it on April 4. So all up, about 2 months of decent study time. 2 hours every weekday and more on either Saturday/Sunday.

Check out my thread about me sitting the test, I've listed my resources in there. In a nutshell, my resources:

- Paul Grevink's study guide (this is gold!)
- thefoglite.com (this is great too)
- The Clustering Technical Deepdive book
- Lots and lots of lab time. Lab up EVERYTHING. It's all fair game, I had two full tasks on something not many people use in their daily life and that thing is AutoDeploy. DO NOT miss anything.
- I read the Mastering vSphere book about 3 times over

Other members, blargoe and dave330i also passed their DCA's not too long ago. Their threads contain a wealth of info too.

Good luck on what should be a great learning experience. If you have specific questions, shoot!

dave330i

Congratulations. Have you received your cert #?

webgeek

Congrats! Where did you take the course? Did you do that online school a lot of TE'ers are in?

dave330i

Essendon wrote: »

Other members, blargoe and dave330i also passed their DCA's not too long ago. Their threads contain a wealth of info too.

That's a lie. My threads are worthless.

meadIT

Congrats!

JohnnyBiggles

dave330i wrote: »

Congratulations. Have you received your cert #?

Thanks! I checked VMware's site and still only see the course listed, so no, not yet. Anyone know how long this takes and if you receive an actual certificate by mail/pdf?

JohnnyBiggles

webgeek wrote: »

Congrats! Where did you take the course? Did you do that online school a lot of TE'ers are in?

My company set it up with a learning center called New Horizons which turned out to allow the students to do it from home (or go in to the center if your home computer was not up to par). Fortunately, my home PC was and I was able to do it in my PJs & slippers Oddly, although very informative, the course didn't cover in detail as much as I was expecting, despite how long it was. There's a long way to go after taking that course! What course is this you speak of?

dave330i

JohnnyBiggles wrote: »

Thanks! I checked VMware's site and still only see the course listed, so no, not yet. Anyone know how long this takes and if you receive an actual certificate by mail/pdf?

They'll send you an e-mail to the one you used to register for the exam giving you a link to mylearn. This e-mail used to take 30 days. They've been pretty good about it lately. I got my e-mail about 2 days after the exam. Follow the link to mylearn, sign your life away and you'll get a physical cert in about 6-8 weeks.

Dakinggamer87

Congrats on pass!!

N2IT

Well done!

JohnnyBiggles

Essendon wrote: »

I highly recommend doing the DCA if you work on vSphere daily. The amount of stuff you learn is astonishing, really. I worked on vSphere before I took the DCA, and I after I've done it I am able to look at vSphere from a different angle, if you will.

I found the DCA "easier". Easier because I labbed the hell out of it. Dunno if you know about the DCA, but it's done on a live lab, you have 26 tasks to complete and about 70% of the tasks you'll have are what a senior(ish) vSphere admin would do on a daily basis. I am the kind of person that does practical stuff better than memorize a bunch of things.

Timeframe: I started studying for it in October, then slacked off on the study in November because of work. I started a new job in early December and focused on it more than the study. Started in earnest again in Feb, really ramped it up in March and finally took it on April 4. So all up, about 2 months of decent study time. 2 hours every weekday and more on either Saturday/Sunday.

Check out my thread about me sitting the test, I've listed my resources in there. In a nutshell, my resources:

- Paul Grevink's study guide (this is gold!)
- thefoglite.com (this is great too)
- The Clustering Technical Deepdive book
- Lots and lots of lab time. Lab up EVERYTHING. It's all fair game, I had two full tasks on something not many people use in their daily life and that thing is AutoDeploy. DO NOT miss anything.
- I read the Mastering vSphere book about 3 times over

Other members, blargoe and dave330i also passed their DCA's not too long ago. Their threads contain a wealth of info too.

Good luck on what should be a great learning experience. If you have specific questions, shoot!

Thanks for the info. Can you link that thread?

Essendon

Yeah, it's only a few threads down from this one. http://www.techexams.net/forums/virtualization/87897-sitting-my-vcap5-dca-tomorrow.html