So I recently took on the VCAP5-DCA (VMware Certified Advanced Professional 5 – Datacenter Administration) exam.

The statistic for Denmark, where I live, says there are only 17 people who hold one or more VCAP certifications.

Considering that statistic I was a bit nervous going in on the exam.

The exam it self is a practical exam, meaning no multiple choice questions.

You will have 3.5 hours for this practical hands-on exam and in case you are not a native speaker of the exam language you will receive an additional 30 minutes.

For me this meant 4 hours total and I will tell you right now that I could have easily used more time!

As always, before even starting to study for a VMware exam I recommend to read the exam blueprint.

I simply can not stress the importance of this enough. Working my day job as an VMware instructor I hear students who failed the exam say “I did not know I would be asked this or that on the exam”.

This is a really poor excuse and tells me they did not review the blueprint as I suggested.

As preparation for the exam I used the following materials:

• Exam blueprint
• Attended official VMware course Optimize and Scale at Arrow ECS training center.
• Attended official VMware course Troubleshooting Workshop at Arrow ECS training center.
• Watched Jason Nash’ Optimize and Scale video training at Plural Sight.
• Lots and lots of lab time
• Much ping pong back and forth with my good wingman Frank Brix Pedersen

My strategy through the exam was to note down the question number on the paper provided.

If I completed the question fully then strike it, but if for example I was not able to complete all tasks of the question then note down which task of the question I missed and a very short text to remind me what it was about.

This helped me keep a constant pace moving forward.

I experienced two times where I completely lost the connection to the remote lab system for approximately 5 minutes.

That was not fun and really stressed me.

Eventually the time ran out and then the waiting game began. It took 16 business days before VMware notified of me the result…

I passed!

Big celebrations! The next step will be to start studies for VCAP5-DCD exam.

Unfortunately due to other projects I will not be able to start studying for it until May 2014.