VCP-IaaS Exam Experience

This morning, I passed the VCP-IaaS exam making me an official VCP-Cloud.

Overall, I found the test to be a nice add-on to the VCP5 test that I took back in 2011 and not as hard as I was expecting it to be. Don’t get me wrong, you have to know your stuff. But I think of all the tests that I’ve taken from VMware, this one was more in line of what you would encounter on a day-to-day basis as a vCloud Administrator which is what I think certification tests should be rather than pure memorization of the admin guides. This could be that my role over the past 6 months has been to roll out a vCloud environment, produce a bunch of internal documentation and training, and find new and interesting ways to break the environment.

I can’t discuss actual questions from the test itself, but I can tell you what I did to prepare.

  • If you have the equipment, setup a home lab. If not, find a way to set it up at work even if it is just a proof of concept somewhere. I was very fortunate that deploying vCloud was one of my main projects so I had a great playground to work with.
  • Pour over the documentation. This seems like an obvious answer, but the blueprint spells out exactly what is on the test so read all the documentation surrounding those sections. I find that I read the documentation once, then I go back and look for all the ‘note’ sections and best practices and then try to come up with a question that gives a situation showing the opposite of the best practice. It’s a way of training the brain for some the questions that are going to be coming at you in the test.
  • Find study note blogs. There are a ton of them out there and these will often do the work of the previous suggestion for you, but I like to make sure I’ve thoroughly read the documentation before looking at someone else’s cliff notes.
  • Listen to the vBrownBag Podcasts. These guys have been knocking it out of the park for a while now. I downloaded and listened to all the VCP-IaaS related podcasts over the past several days to have another avenue of the information coming in. Read it, hear it, do it. I think it covers all the learning styles out there. Surely something will sink in.

By far, the hardest part for me on the test was the ChargeBack items as its the area where I have the least amount of experience. That’s probably where I spent the most time studying for this exam and from what I’ve heard from others, it was a pretty similar experience.

That’s pretty much it. Good luck to anyone out there that is taking the test.