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