I am sure you have found this page by looking for VCAP-DCD resources. Well in common with other people I wanted to record my own experiences, partly for my own sake but also for those that have come here seeking reassurance.

I started my VCAP journey in mid 2014 after a colleague and I decided we were going to do it. We both booked the VCAP-DCA exam for the same day.  Read about that here.

With regard to the DCD exam I began to look at this shortly after passing the DCA in mid February 2015. First thing first was booking the exam for mid May. In the end due to some big events that occurred I didnt take the exam until the start of September.

The exam itself

I arrived early to the test centre partly as it is around an hour away from home and that I like to get there, signed in and have a few minutes to relax. After a short coffee I was called to sign in and offered a cupboard to place my belongings. The key came with a large stuffed toy attached, they clearly don’t want you walking out with it. I joked with the girl asking if that was what I needed to erase my notes on the transparent card that they give you to write on. She laughed but said she’d give me two cards instead and not to use the stuffed toy!

So with that I entered the room and was glad to see that they have put a coating on the windows so that the light came in but you couldn’t really see out. Last time I found it a bit distracting looking into a classroom across the courtyard.

Of course I can’t go into the Exam due to the NDA but what I can say though is that I finished with 45 minutes spare mostly because I live in a non-English speaking country and automatically was given the extra 30 minutes. At no time though did I feel rushed and felt that I would have been OK with the normal 195 minutes. I had a good 10 minutes review to go through the entire exam before ending it.

I took the advice of many by doing the designs first, followed by the master design and then the drag and drops. The designs were a mixture of the things that you would expect so study Storage, Networks, dependencies as well as knowing where products fit into things.

The exam covered everything from Risks, Requirements, Constraints and Assumptions as well as the Infrastructure qualities AMPRS.  The difficulty as others have said and that I found out is that you dot know which questions you got wrong for missing things, or not having the right things in there. Clearly I dropped points but there are only a couple of places where I was taking a decision to leave something out or put something extra in. Funny how before and after I can see clearly a physical design in my mind but during the exam its easy to get clouded and start imagining connectors should be where they probably shouldn’t 🙂

Before going onto the references I used, firstly some personal advice.

-Get some experience under your belt. I’m sure some people can pass without ever touching the product but you cant beat seeing this in real life. If you don’t work with it then definitively follow the next point.

-Maybe not required for DCD but if you can get a small lab. Doesn’t need to be perfect but it helps so much to see settings in the context where they will be used. It also meant that I didn’t need to break production to test things.

-Learn a speed reading technique. There is so much fluff that you need to be able to get through to the good stuff. A technique I used for the books/papers was to read the first and last pages of a chapter to get a feel for what was contained within. You can then decide if you want to read it slowly or skim it for new stuff. Well worth the effort to discipline yourself otherwise you will get overwhelmed.

– Do try drawing designs/dependencies out of your head onto paper. It will help when it comes to the exam and you are trying to lay it out on the screen.

And now here is my list of resources which I’m sure you wont be surprised is a well read/used list. 

– Blueprint and all the docs that came from it. 
I took a view to read everything at least once but the important parts are Best Practice and Design Considerations. Easily over 3000 pages
.
– Hershey Cartwright’s Cookbook

– Forbes Guthrie’s book (By far and away the best – Definitively put this on your list)

– The official Study Guide (OK but was a review for me)

– O’Reilly Cookbook

– Pluralsight videos (As many vSphere videos as I could)

– VMware Education have some good free education stuff  so use what you can.I was lucky as I could also go through the VSP/VTSP stuff from the partner site. Some of that is useful as it talks about mapping products to customer needs to make sales. Think Requirements, Assumptions etc.