It was almost 1 year ago today that I published my VCAP4-DCA Landing Page. Back on July 16th, I finally got around to taking my VCAP4-DCA exam after the struggle with my VCAP Madness and accidentally passing the VCAP4-DCD.
It took exactly 9 business days to get the email from the certification team, and they do a good job with scaring the crap out of you. The email reads as such:
Hello,
Thank you for participating in the VMware Certified Advanced Professional program. Please find your VCAP4-DCA score report attached.
Kind Regards,
The VMware Technical Certification Team
Wow! How scary is that? They make you open an attachment to see if you passed! Loading the PDF is the most nervous 3 seconds of your life, but it's worth the wait when you see that word "PASS". Whew...
As for the exam... @repping said it best after I took my exam, it's fun. It's a combination of stress, time, and knowledge. As you're going through it, your psyched to get questions you know you can knock out in 15 seconds flat, but as you're reading the next question and bafflement overcomes your thoughts, stress sets in.
Here are a few tips during the exam I would suggest:
- Write down the username and password on the scratchpad of pen and paper that is given to you.
- Last thing you want to do is worry about switching windows and minimizing and moving screens in a slow RDP session. These are precious seconds wasted. The exam is 3 hours and 30 minutes. You'll need every second. Unless you are some vSphere god/rockstar.
- Completely skip questions that you are clueless on or that you aren't familiar with.
- I don't know jack about powercli, so I completely skipped and missed out on those points. There are many more questions that will need time dedicated to them, focus on stuff you know then go back and revisit.
- Write down the question numbers and a note on questions you think you might have missed and need to review.
- I probably had 8 or 9 numbers written down and something next to it that said "esxcli" or "vMA admin" (sorry can't give away the real questions). This way when I got to the last question and it was time to review, I knew what questions were higher priority.
- Don't sit and wait for a task to finish
- If I came to a question that I knew a task would take a few minutes to complete, such as vMotion/SvMotion, I would start the process and go ahead with the next question. But I would make sure to write down the question number and a note that said something like "make sure XX completed".
- Don't be nervous and try to relax. After all, it's just a test and your prior knowledge should be able to get you through most of the questions.
What should you do to prep for the exam?:
- Get a home lab
- seriously. get a freaking lab that you can break and fix stuff. You will need to know how to do alot of stuff that you can't learn from reading a book and you definitely don't want to play in a production environment
- Use Sean Crookston's VCAP-DCA study guides.
- My VCAP Landing Page has a TON of information, but in all honesty, it's way too much information. Sean's approach is summarized and it's easy to learn and memorize.
- Don't get caught up in knowing how to do everything via CLI.
- It's good to know how to do things in the CLI, but not everything needs to be configured that way. As long as the end result is achieved, that's all that matters
- Study both ESX and ESXi
- You get a server of each, know how to configure stuff on both of them
- Know vicfg- commands and a few linux commands for the vMA
- be familiar with all the vicfg- commands as well as esxcli
- Know vCenter
- vCenter is the heart of vSphere and I would say 60-75% of the questions all related to doing something inside vCenter.
- Get David Davis of TrainSignal's vSphere Troubleshooting Course.
- I can't recommend this course enough. In all honesty, it's probably the best study material you are going to find. 70% of these DVDs will be done on the exam. No joke.
Best of luck to everyone on their VCAP-DCA studies. Remember, it's a fun test, come out of it feeling that way. Thank you to everyone on twitter that has congratulated me. I appreciate it and looking forward to see everyone at VMworld!
