My VCAP5-DCA Experience

Today is brilliant. I received my VCAP5-DCA results. I passed!!!

I’m very, very happy because the exam didn’t get the way I wanted to.

I went through some difficulties during the exam, beside the real hardiness of the exam itself.

First of all, the remote access to the Lab was horrible! It was so slow that switching between applications within a RDP session took several seconds. I’m not talking about 3 or 4 seconds, but more like 20… this brought a lot of pressure on my shoulders as the time literally runs.

Secondly, you will receive few paper sheets during the exam. Ask for extra ones! The tasks you have to go through give you a lot of information. Write down the important points, like that you won’t have to switch several times between the task description screen and the RDP sessions screen. And if the remote session is poor, it will spare you extra time.

Thirdly, if you have a task, or a part of a task that you don’t know, note it and go to the next one. Of course you will have access to the whole documentation, but if you don’t know what you are looking for and where in documentation you might find it, simply forget it! You don’t have a lot of time to go through the whole tasks. Don’t waste your time finding information you don’t know about. You might lose too much time on a single task, and being out of time for other tasks that you could have handled. Like I said. A point you don’t know about, skip it!

Besides that, the DCA is really tough. It challenges your capacity for administering and troubleshooting a virtual infrastructure.

To get prepared, I spent around 40 hours studying. I used several resources like the vBrownBag and the 3 following sites that are a gold mine of information:

http://www.vexperienced.co.uk

http://paulgrevink.wordpress.com

http://www.virtuallanger.com

This exam was a thrilling experience for me. Before, during and at the end when I received the result.

I sincerely want to thank @egrigson (http://www.vexperienced.co.uk); @paulgrevink (http://paulgrevink.wordpress.com); @jaslanger (http://www.virtuallanger.com) and of course @cody_bunch (http://professionalvmware.com/brownbags)

And finally, my old friend @ErikBussink who helped out during my preparation.

Without you guys it would have been a much, much more difficult to pass this one. Thank you again.