Whew! It was a close one, but I managed to pass VCP-510 to earn my latest VCP certification. And this was a tough one, especially since all my hands-on experience was 100% lab. I created a lab environment on my laptop and just went to town. Thankfully, my laptop is robust enough to handle 3 host servers, a couple nested VMs, another VM as a domain controller and an OpenFiler iSCSI virtual storage array.
When I studied for my VCP4 exam back in Nov-Dec 2009, I was already using vSphere 4 in a production environment at the office. We had just recently upgraded from ESX 3.5. I couldn’t quite try concepts out and break things as in a real lab, but I at least had real world experience which came in handy on exam day. I also read through all of VMware documentation, and used many of the common study aids at the time posted by popular bloggers. This time, I tried the same approach and was a little overwhelmed by the sheer volume of documentation to work through. Of course, I targeted the Exam Blueprint but it was still a massive amount of ground to cover. Good thing there was some overlap with vSphere 4.
I pulled guides from many of the great bloggers out there, all of which have been listed by others out there so there’s nothing new on this list. This just gives me a good reference point to come back to when I start studying for the VCAP exams!
Forbes Guthrie’s vReference notes – Amazing!
Andrea Mauro’s VCP5 notes – Great stuff!
Even picked up TrainSignal’s vSphere 5 Training DVD
And of course, all of VMware’s vSphere 5 documentation!
Lot of study, but if paid off. Here on the last day that the class requirement was waived, I squeaked by with a modest passing score! Hooray! Feels good to add VCP5 to my collection of certifications!
Brian Trainor, VCP 3/4/5
Mount Virtual 