My VCAP-DCA Exam Experience

Today I took my VCAP-DCA exam over at Global Knowledge in Nieuwegein. I had to complete approximately 40 assignments ranging from easy to ones I really didn’t know or had the potential to consume a lot of time. If you encounter a question you get stuck on, just write down the number and hop over to the next assignment. I  was able to complete the assignments with one hour left, but I skipped 10 questions. In the end I managed to complete 4 of those 10 when the exam ended.  The prep material I’ve used is:

• The vSphere Troubleshooting Video by David Davis
• The esxcli posts over at virtuallyGhetto by William Lam
• The Yellow-Bricks website by Duncan Epping
• The laboratory exercises from the vSphere Troubleshooting training
• The laboratory exercises from the vSphere Manage for Performance  training
• The laboratory exercises from the vSphere PowerCLI training
• The laboratory exercises from the vSphere Design for Security training
• The Datacenter Administration Exam Study Guide by Sean Crookston

You definitely need hands-on experience to pass for this exam, not only with the vSphere Client but also on the command line. In the end I think it’s a fair exam. The waiting has begun, in 10 days I’ll let you know if I passed it. I had so much fun doing the VCAP-DCA exam, I would love to do it for the second time. A few last tips: Don’t stare yourself blind on the VCAP-DCA Exam Blueprint Guide. Just create your own test environment and give yourself assignments. Don’t rely on the PDF documents which are available during the exam. You can’t answer every question by looking it up. You will run out of time while you’re scrolling through the PDF’s. Don’t drink too much before starting the exam, you don’t want to lose valuable time at the toilet. If you have a hard time memorize commands and phrases, create a cheat sheet and read it a few times a day. If you have enough training budget, follow the advanced VMware vSphere courses. They are aligned to the exam. Good luck and have fun while prepping.

Update 28/02/2011: Congratulations on passing the VMware Certified Advanced Professional vSphere4 Datacenter Administration exam!