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VCP5 Tips & Advice

kavorka19

n00b
Joined
Jul 29, 2012
Messages
49
I was wanting to take the VCP5 exam this fall. I just wanted some advice from anyone who has taken it. I've taken the vSphere 5.0: Install, Configure, Manage course as a college class and still have the materials we used to study with.

I was also wondering if anyone knew of a good/reliable source where I could get a free study guide or a mock exam of some sort. Key word being, free :)
 
There is an app in the App Store that has many of the questions from the exam (it's like $15). Go through that and study what you get wrong in your class materials. Overall, the test is pretty easy to pass.
 
Read Scott Lowe's "mastering vSphere 5" book. Read the blueprint thoroughly and get a small lab setup (even if it's on workstation) just to make sure you're comfortable with all of the motions in the GUI and to explore what options are where. I noticed the VCP-level tests to have a lot of photographic memory stuff on them.
 
If you go through the blueprint piece by piece and you lab everything to death you should have no issues. Also, I'd suggest knowing how things work from the CLI a bit. Things such as esxtop.
 
Read Scott Lowe's "mastering vSphere 5" book. Read the blueprint thoroughly and get a small lab setup (even if it's on workstation) just to make sure you're comfortable with all of the motions in the GUI and to explore what options are where. I noticed the VCP-level tests to have a lot of photographic memory stuff on them.

Just grabbed it and started to read it. Thanks for the tip.

If you go through the blueprint piece by piece and you lab everything to death you should have no issues. Also, I'd suggest knowing how things work from the CLI a bit. Things such as esxtop.

Thanks for this and thanks to anyone else who chimed it. I appreciate it :)
 
I'll second the line about lots of photographic memory items. Be very famailar with the UI. Where items are, what stats are available at various levels, what the stats are actually telling you. I failed my first try and after I went back and labbed it to death I was passed easily.

And be sure to know HA/DRS inside and out.
 
I passed mine back in February, this guide helped me quite a bit:

http://www.virtuallanger.com/vcp5/

What I did was print out the exam blueprint & then mark off each line item as I went through the PDF study guide. I'd already done the vast majority of the stuff on the list but I went through each anyway. I setup a full lab with multiple ESXi hosts, vCenter, etc. running on my home ESXi machine. iSCSI and NFS shares included, so I could setup full environments.

My one recommendation:

Make sure you explore the ways of doing this differently than you're used to - If there's a place with a default and custom path, know both. Otherwise stupidly simple stuff will cost you points.

I passed first try (with quite a few years of running ESXi at home). I didn't have a huge amount of HA/DRS experience but I still passed.

Viper GTS
 
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