I’ve just sat and passed my VCP 5 exam and thought I’d pass on some of the things I did to prepare for this.
- Home Lab – Luckily I have a couple of HP DL based servers to be able to deploy a vSphere 5 (which can be downloaded with 60 day evaluation licenses) environment and test everything I could think of. I think it is essential to have a home lab so you can deploy all the VMware products, play with then, break them, and learn how to fix it. If you don’t have access to servers, download VMware workstation and deploy ESX to that. The main thing is, try to implement everything you can so you get to see all the options and settings.
- Mock Exam on VCP 5 – this gives you the best illustration of the actual exam, practise, practise, and practise. There are quite a few mock exams on the web, some aren’t as accurate as they should be, so definitely use the official one.
- Exam Blueprint on VCP 5 – get to know this well, it does point you in the right direction when looking for things to study and test on your home lab.
- YouTube – there is some good videos on YouTube that can be of help.
- Home Lab – 🙂 yes, I know I said it in Number 1, but I can’t stress how important it is to have a home lab setup, it makes life so much easier.
- Take the training course! If you’re new to this take VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage [V5.0] or Whats New [V5.0] if you have VCP4 already
- Mastering VMware vSphere 5 is available from Amazon in real paperback or not so real kindle/ebook. I found the version 4 book brilliant, and the version 5 is even better. Scott knows what he is talking about and it’s a nice easy read, rather than a boring technical manual.
You will have to switch into study mode and dedicate quite a bit of time to learning all the ins and outs of vSphere to be able to have enough knowledge to go into this exam with confidence. Best of luck!
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