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VCAP Exams

I have had a good response to my page on the VCP exam so I wanted to do a companion page on the VCAP exams.  These exams are much more challenging and are designed for administrators that are further along in their virtualization careers.  This is not to say that passing them is not an achievable goal for any administrator – just that it will take some more practice and study than previous exams.

VCAP-DCA Exam

The VCAP-DCA exam was a very challenging exam; it is far more difficult than the VCP exam, in my opinion.  It would be very hard to pass this exam without extensive hands on knowledge, as it has you do a set of tasks on one set of live systems. This exam is 100% Lab based, and these are not simulators (like other exams) – they are real systems running real VMware software.

The tasks cover a range of topics from basic administration tasks to PowerCLI and Orchestrator, and because of this the exam blueprint is a great place to start studying.  I can’t give any specific question details, but I can give the following generic tips:

  1. Know how to build, configure and repair an ESX and ESXi server using the command line (this includes things like registering and unregistering a VM for example).
  2. Know how to do everything in #1 from the console, vMA and from PowerCLI
  3. Know vCenter networking features inside and out, including DVS and vShield
  4. Know all of the other vCenter features like VUM and Orchestrator
  5. Know the ‘fringe’ products like Heartbeat.

This may seem like a ton of information, and it is, but the point of this test is to see if you actually have the skills to administrate a VMware vCenter environment (and not just memorize facts about it).  As Duncan has said in his post, I also want to stress LAB TIME – make the time to practice in a lab environment.

I want to stress it so much that I am going to say it again:

LAB TIME!

I hope that helps, feel free to drop me a line if there are any further things that I might have missed.

VCAP-DCD Exam

The VCAP-DCD was a challenging exam, but in my opinion it was the easier of the two exams.  Part of the reason that this exam was easier for me is due to my experience with the CISSP – many of the concepts for Disaster Recover and Business Continuity were taught to me during that certification process.  I did not take the old VI3 design exam so I cannot really make many comparisons to it, but this exam seemed pretty straight forward.

As for things to study, first check out the exam blueprint on the certification website it has a comprehensive list of all of the documents that an exam candidate needs be familiar with before the exam. These topics will include things like:

  1. VMware best practices for virtualizing various applications (SQL, Exchange, Active Directory etc)
  2. VMware best practices for sizing physical hosts.
  3. VMware best practices for designing redundant infrastructures.
  4. VMware best practices for developing physical and logical designs.
  5. Basic Networking design (when to use technologies like trunking and ether channel, how to build a redundant network)
  6. Basic Storage design (when to use particular RAID levels, how to build a redundant SAN)
  7. Basic Security design (how to determine levels of trust, how to translate those into a security design)

These are just some of the topics that I studied for the exam – but I want to to be a challenge for everyone, and agreed to a NDA, so I haven’t included every topic on the exam in this list but some general guidance.

The questions on this exam are a combination of multiple choice single answer, multiple choice multiple answer and design simulations.  The design simulations were kind of tricky for me because my exam computer kept lagging, but this video gives a good tutorial of the interface and workings of them before test time so you can plan accordingly.

Good luck on both exams and please let me know how your experience went!  You can get me at hello[at]beyondvm[dot]com or on AIM at beyondvm.