Has anyone done VCP 5 yet?

[kmcferrin]

Hey all, it looks like I will be taking the VCP 5 exam after the first of the year, and I was wondering if anyone can tell me how the exam stacks up to other certification exams in difficulty. I have never taken a VMware exam before but I have taken many CompTIA and Microsoft exams with no problems.

I am looking over the exam blueprint from VMware, and I see that they also have a "mock exam" that I plan on taking at some point to get a feel for their process. I had a lot of experience with ESX 3.0 and 3.5, but only used 4.0 and 4.1 sparingly. I will be taking the "Install, Configure, Manage" course for vSphere 5 in a few weeks so I should be able to get up to speed on the new features, and I have hardware available if I want/need to build out a small test environment. Does anyone else have specific recommendations and resources?

________________________________________
CompTIA A+, Network+, Server+, Security+
MCTS:Windows 7
MCSE:Security 2003
MCITP:Server Administrator
MCITP:Enterprise Administrator
MCITP:Virtualization Administrator 2008 R2
Certified Quest vWorkspace Administrator

 

[itsp1965]

From posts on other sites that I have seen the VCP5 seems a lot more difficult then the VCP4 exam (I found that exam extremely difficult -- without an intimate knowledge of the product).

I would suggest you take a look at

http://vmwaretraining.blogspot.com/

Also for exam practice

http://www.simonlong.co.uk/blog/vcp5-practice-exams/

As all VCP exams, they're heavily reliant on the exam blueprint. Follow this to a tee and get as much practice as you can.

Good luck

 

[ArizonaGeek]

My coworker just took the exam last week. From what he describes it is a lot harder. 70 questions and 2 hours, he said he used every bit of the two hours. Also, if you know quite a bit about 3.0 and 3.5 you will really need to get 5.0 installed, it is quite a bit different.

Just a bit of what you'll need to know: traffic shaping, distributive networks, licensing, VMFS and NFS datastores, virtual apps, fault tolerance, you will need to know HA and DRS and creating alarms and upgrading vCenter and ESXi from 4.1 to 5.0, the upgrade is much different than previous versions.

I am also going to take my test after the first of the year, but I have been running 5.0 about a month now after upgrading my 4.1 environment.

Good luck!

Cheers
Rob

The answer is always "PEBKAC!

 

[kmcferrin]

Thanks all. I had the class last week and was fairly disappointed. Having used ESX 3.5 and a little 4.0/4.1 about 80% of the class was things that I already knew, and many of the things that I was hoping to learn more about (licensing, distributed switches, etc) weren't in the course material. But at least I can get the cert now.

I need to stand up a lab environment at home to work through all of this. I recall that vSphere can be installed inside of ESXi, is that correct? I'm thinking of taking one of my lab machines with 16 or 32GB of RAM and loading it with ESXi, then installing an eval of vSphere 5 (including more ESXi nodes) on VMs inside of the physical ESXi host, then defining internal-only networks for connectivity, etc. Other than the fact that it will be a tad slow, does anyone see any problem with this?

________________________________________
CompTIA A+, Network+, Server+, Security+
MCTS:Windows 7
MCSE:Security 2003
MCITP:Server Administrator
MCITP:Enterprise Administrator
MCITP:Virtualization Administrator 2008 R2
Certified Quest vWorkspace Administrator