My VCP 5 Exam experience

One year ago I passed VCP4 exam. That was a tough adventure. In August 2010 I attended my training on vSphere 4.1 and it was my very first experience with virtualization technologies. 2 weeks after the training I built my first vSphere farm on new HP Blade servers and carried out my first migration from VI 3.5 to vSphere 4.1. It was a hard time for me - zero real life experience, lack of knowledge and understanding how all these technologies work. However, by October 2010 I was ready to take my first exam for VMware. The final score of exam was just a little bit higher than the passing score, but I was still happy since I fell in love with vSphere and virtualization world.

This year I have decided to take an exam without any hands on experience with vSphere 5 for the simple reason that I don't have free time to build a proper lab and play around with new features. All my time currently is devoted to a preparation for a VCAP-DCA lab. Since this preparation has been lasting for last 6 month I can say now I have a solid understanding of main vSphere technologies. Also, I have designed and built few small to medium size vSphere farms and gained some real life experience with vSphere. 

So, I have started with reading all "vSphere 5: What's New" documentation. After that I decided to take a mock exam on VMware site and then I found out that there were still some gaps in my vSphere 5 knowledge. Reading official documenation is not a big fun. Therefore I wanted to buy some good book that explains the new technologies in depth and, what is more important, provides examples of their practical implementations, which helps me a lot to memorize the material. Surprise-surprise, I found only one vSphere 5 book available on Amazon site, which is the great book by Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman, however it was not exactly what I wanted for VCP5 exam preparation. So, I had to go back to VCP 5 Blueprint and go through all links to official VMware documentation, which took me about a week. 

The exam was more difficult than I expected. I was actually a bit scared after I answered first 10 questions and wasn't sure if my answers were correct in 5 of them. I was surprised there were very few questions about configuration maximums and none about licensing. That was a bit frustrating as I have spent a lot of time in debates about new licensing model :)  Surprisingly, there were more  questions than I expected about vCenter appliance. I can definitely say this exam requires more real life experience with vSphere than VCP4. Good thing is that probably about 80% of exam material is inherited from VCP4 exam, therefore, if you feel confident in your expertise in vSphere 4 it shouldn't take you more than a week to go through blueprint briefly, focusing only on new features.  Additionally, I checked some popular virtualization blogs to get alternative view or interpretation of the particular feature and I really like reading implementation examples' stories.  

A day before exam I looked for more mock exams on the Internet and found some good links here. I would say all of them are not as difficult as the real one, but at least you can find out what your gaps in vSphere 5 knowledge are and gain some confidence in yourself :)

Now I can go back to my VCAP-DCA lab. I would like to wish a good luck for this exam to all of you who has the same passion for virtualization technologies as I have. :)

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