The vGeek Blog

Today I passed the VMware VCP5 certification exam and, after VCP3 and VCP4, I am again aligned with the latest and greatest technology from VMware.

Tough exam, tougher than I expected and definitely study notes alone are not enough to pass it. You need to have real, in depth hands-on experience on all the topics covered on the Official Exam Blueprint and, wherever possible, it’s worth to build a home lab and perform extra practice. Have a look at the excellent VCP5 Blueprint with study notes compiled by Andrea Mauro from the Italian VMUG – by the way, did you know that Italians rock at virtualization? :-)

Questions in the exam can be about overlooked little details not all admins encounter in their daily jobs, but also there’s very little of the kind of stuff that has to be memorized (I only encountered one “configuration maximum” question out of 85), and this is a good thing, because this exam is more about real experience and about how to put things together and connect the dots, rather than a pure memory exercise.

So again, use your professional experience as a foundation, be sure you go through each point in the Exam Blueprint and whatever you don’t know directly (not everyone has access to a Fiber Channel SAN etc), there’s plenty of great blogs that can be used as a source of information.

Personally, I studied on Scott Lowe’s Mastering vSphere 5 and Frank Denneman’s and Duncan Epping’s VMware vSphere 5 Clustering Deepdive books and played around in my home lab (besides leveraging the Virtual Infrastructure I manage for a living). I am also being told how good are Trainsignal video trainings on vSphere 5.

Plenty of additional resources can be found at Scott Vessey’s comprehensive VMware Training and Certification blog.

If you already hold the VCP4 certification, don’t forget that you have time until next February 28, 2012 to sit and pass the exam. After that date you will have to mandatorily attend one of the pre-qualifying VMware trainings.

Best luck to all the candidates with their study and exam!

I will now move on on learning PowerCLI and putting together info about VCAP-DCD (the next certification I am aiming to).

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