Last week I passed the VCP5 exam. I will not give you any detail about the exam, but only my general experience: after reading around many reviews, I found most of them agreed about the exam beeing tougher and more selective than VCP4.
I would not like to seem offbeat, but to me it was like the previous one and with the same level of difficulty: its value is instead beeing now more “real” and in this way easier for me: less theoretical questions about parameters and configurations to remember, and more scanarios to reason about. I never borne sciolitic exams, thre are tons of official papers to read when I need a configuration value, without feeling myself “less expert” because of this.
So, thanks to VMware for tuning this exam, even if the hardest one for me is still VCP 3 🙂
While preparing for the exam, I used some useful resources I would like to share.
First of all, a good lab. It can be completely nested in a computer, or a real/almost real cluster, but it’s important to test and learn options, configurations, features. My lab is described here.
I then studied on some books:
Mastering VMware vSphere 5, di Scott Lowe
VMware Vsphere 5.0 Clustering Technical Deepdive, di Duncan Epping e Frank Denneman
It was also really helpful the “VCP5 blueprint with study notes – English version“, by fellow vExpert Andrea Mauro.
Last, if you want something different from books and papers, there is a series of videos from professionalvmware.com, so called Brownbags. While I was writing this article there were 5 of them:
ProfessionalVMware BrownBag – VCP5 Objective 1
ProfessionalVMware BrownBag – VCP5 Section 2: Networking (Scott Lowe)
ProfessionalVMware BrownBag – VCP5 Objective 3