VCP5

Ok, so I haven't made a single post since January. Nice! What a waste of a blog, yeah? Probably. Never the less, here we are again, with more VMware certification related happiness; I just sat and passed the VCP5 certification exam. I wouldn't say there was a comfortable margin involved, not as compared with my VCAP-DCD attempt, but a pass is a pass, and now I know where the gaps in my knowledge are so I can stuff them full of new knowledge.

My experience with the VCP510 exam is as follows:

It's a good exam. To my mind, a harder exam than the VCP410 that proceeded it. As VMware add new features and new complimentary products (like the vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA), VMware Storage Appliance (VSA), and the Auto Deploy magic) it stands to reason that the exam is going to cover more bases and a broader, yet just as deep, understanding is needed to look after the VMware farms of today, let alone to pass the exam.

If you ask me, and you implicitly have, the VCP510 blueprint doesn't tell the whole story. If you knew exactly, and only, the knowledge points on the blueprint you'd fail. Of course, in the real world, if you know the knowledge points on the blueprint, chances are you know the detail that fills the spaces in between too.

Me? I needed to know more about SIOC and NIOC.

Spend some quality time in esxtop. Know the PowerCLI, vCLI and the ESXi shell. Storage DRS was a big one, and vDR showed up more than I expected. Know your constraints for HA, DRS, FT, SDRS, etc. etc.

But everyone's exam will probably be different.

I got a 367, and I'm not happy about it.

Of course it'll help if you've been living and breathing vSphere 5 for a while. My clusters are still 4.1 :)