Like many oth­ers I was a VCP 4 and needed to upgrade to VCP 5 by Feb 29th to avoid a pricey class and pos­si­ble rib­bing from my peers.  I was well aware of this dead­line since mid Decem­ber, how­ever, I pro­cras­ti­nated on study­ing and was mostly fling­ing myself around the globe doing imple­men­ta­tions and hav­ing an all around good time.  When Feb 1st came I was sit­ting on a flight from Saigon to Frank­furt and that is when panic struck.  I real­ized I had until the end of the month to fin­ish the require­ment.  I instantly pulled out my iPad and began fran­ti­cally comb­ing thru the VCP 5 Blue­print and read­ing count­less doc­u­ments over the 12+ hour flight.

When I returned home that is when I really began to crack the books.  When I was too tired to keep read­ing offi­cial vSphere Docs or play­ing in my lab Cody Bunch’s Pro­fes­sional VMware Brown­bags were per­fect to sit and lis­ten and absorb some info.  It was really help­ful as they go thru each point of the spe­cific objec­tive of the day and also get some insight from some guests who had already taken the exam.  Another great resource is Andrea Mauro’s vIn­fra­struc­ture VCP 5 notes - there was tons of help­ful infor­ma­tion there.  Also not to be for­got­ten is MW Preston’s VCP 5 resources.  Finally, I would never study for a VCP exam with­out using the great prac­tice exams avail­able from Simon Long of the SLOG Blog.  While there are many other great resources avail­able there are too many to list here as this is an expe­ri­ence post.

So after comb­ing thru all these resources hours per night for a cou­ple of weeks I finally booked my exam for Feb 28th.  Then that is when the nerves really set in.  I started to doubt if with 3 weeks of study­ing I had pre­pared enough or if I was going to be sur­prised with a lot of new con­tent.  So I pushed on and con­tin­ued read­ing and pos­si­bly obsess­ing over par­tic­u­lar objec­tives I was not 100% com­fort­able with until the days ran out.

Test day I left work after lunch and drove to the test cen­ter.  Dur­ing check in I was a bit ner­vous and began hav­ing trou­ble speak­ing Swiss Ger­man to the test­ing cen­ter staff.  I sat down and first took the sur­vey which made me even more ner­vous know­ing the test was com­ing soon.  When the test began and I got thru the first 20 ques­tions and my nerves began to lighten.  I real­ized all the vSphere 5 imple­men­ta­tions I did recently along with read­ing up on some of the new fea­tures was the ticket.  With­out get­ting to much into details as I am bound by NDA, this exam was more about know­ing the prod­uct and work­ing with it on a day to day basis rather than straight mem­o­riza­tion.  For the VCP 4 I remem­ber spend­ing count­less hours mem­o­riz­ing Con­fig­u­ra­tion Max­i­mums and other things that promptly left my head after the test was com­pleted.  After all that is what the Con­fig­u­ra­tion Max­i­mum doc­u­ments are for!

In con­clu­sion I think that for actual Vir­tu­al­iza­tion pro­fes­sion­als that have their hands on the prod­uct every­day VCP 5 is much eas­ier than VCP 4.  In the end I only spent an hour and 10 min­utes on the exam and passed with a score I was highly pleased with.  My mes­sage to cur­rent VCP 4 hold­ers is go ahead in and take a shot at the exam.  You might be pleas­antly sur­prised with how VMware has changed the struc­ture of their exams.

Ed Czer­win