I started my VCAP journey in early 2014 after a colleague and I decided we were both going to start studying for it. We both booked the VCAP-DCA exam for the same day initially for some time later in the year. I began my study by watching VMware videos on Pluralsight, specifically the Jason Nash’s Optimise and Scale series as well as David Davis’s VMware Troubleshooting. See the bottom of this page for a list of items. In addition to the video series I pre-ordered the official VCAP-DCA book but had to wait a few months before I got my hands on it due to a delay for it to be published and delivered. 

I had been working with VMware products for a number of years prior to starting studying for the VCAPs and felt pretty comfortable around the VI Client and Web Client. My CLI skills were lagging behind so I initially I decided to work on that aspect. Using the official Blueprint available on the VMware website  I downloaded all the available PDFs that were listed and began to read through them all. Many of the pages in these documents I was able to skip due them being repeated in multiple places. This gave me a good grounding for the exam and helped to beef up my knowledge especially in Networking which I felt was my weak spot. As the year progressed my studying was taking more of a back seat as work became progressively busier. It wasn’t until December 2014 that I resolved to book a new date and stick to it. And so I booked the 510 version of the exam for late January 2015 and began to study hard.

I was lucky in so much as that I had a lab available at work where I was able to set up a couple of ESXi hosts along with a vCenter and practice as much as I could. This was invaluable as I knew I could break the lab and more importantly have the opportunity to fix any issues that I caused.

And so in January 2015 full of confidence I took the exam. I started by following some of the advice I had read on various blogs about setting up the test environment such that I could search through all the PDFs if required with one search. As I had practiced this so many times it took seconds to prepare.  I then went through all the questions clicking next and marking down on the erasable plastic sheet a quick keyword or two so that I could remember what they were. I then returned back and began tackling a few questions. After around 30 minutes I got to one where my confidence got the better of me and I made a mistake that effectively stopped the test environment from working. Without going into too many details I was in a position where I couldn’t really carry on. Subsequently I found out that on the 510 exam this was a pretty common issue where exams ended early due to a mistake. Partly due to the mistake, which later when I thought about it should have been easy to get out of, and also because I had lost momentum, I decided to call it a day after 45 minutes of speaking to the test centre staff and VMware support who confirmed there were no exam issues. In hindsight I should have stayed and fixed it but I thought it better to come back another day and do it properly.

At the time there was a wait period before you could go back and do the exam. As it turned out at the end of January the 510 exam was to be replaced by the 550 exam. So for me I would need to go back to the drawing board and learn the additional material as well as some of the web client features not required for 510.

In February I was back again but this time ready for the challenge. I used the same preparation techniques as before but this time planned out the questions I was going to do and double checked all my steps. In the end I finished the exam with around 10 minutes left that gave me some time to check that I had done them all. Just before the timer finished I clicked the end exam button. I had heard that not clicking this may result in the exam taking longer to score.  I left the test centre and as I made my way to a late lunch check my email and found that I had passed!   

Video Resources

Jason Nash Optimise and Scale
VMware vSphere Optimize & Scale Part 1: Storage & Networking
VMware vSphere Optimize & Scale Part 2: Performance & High Availability
VMware vSphere Optimize & Scale Part 3: Monitoring & Automation

David Davis vSphere Troubleshooting
VMware vSphere Troubleshooting Part 1: Intro to vSphere Troubleshooting
VMware vSphere Troubleshooting Part 2: Troubleshoot vSphere Networking
VMware vSphere Troubleshooting Part 3: Troubleshoot vSphere Storage
VMware vSphere Troubleshooting Part 4: Troubleshoot Advanced Features