Last year what with working from home and other non IT related items that required study time I carried out no certifications in 2020. I had planned to do quite a few but just never seemed to find the time.

So in early 2021 I set myself the goal of updating my existing certifications as well as gaining a few new ones.

The ‘VMware Certified Advanced Professional – Data Center Virtualization Design 2021‘ certification was first on my list. This has a a few pre-requisites depending on whether you have an existing VCAP or starting from scratch. For me as an existing VCAP DCV 6.5 certification holder this was a case of just having to schedule the exam. The certification webpage gives you options depending on your situation.

Exam Prep

Working with VMware products everyday certainly helps and so I felt confident that I could go straight into the exam. However it is always a good idea to review knowledge in order to prepare.

As always the exam blueprint is a good place to start and can be found on the exam home page. For the VCAP DCV 2021 Design at the time of writing there were 2 different exams for this certification. I chose the Advanced Design VMware vSphere 7.x

Therefore I decided to take the VMware vSphere: Optimise and Scale [v7] on demand course to assist in my preparations. I have been working with vSphere for the better part of 12 years but it is always good to review the basics and I was grateful that there were some new items that I learnt as well as reminding myself about some new features or changes in the way things work.

From there it was a case of skim reading a few additional documents most of which are listed on the Blueprint. Rene Van Den Bedem’s blog VCDX133 has a great page with all the links to these VCAP DCV Design 2021 resources.

I also read about Marco Van Baggum’s VCAP 2021 experience on his blog.

Online Exam

First up I decided to try an online proctored exam for the first time. The advantage of this is of course you can do it from home at a time that suits and you are guaranteed not to be using a chronically slow PC with tiny screen which many Test Centres seem to love giving to their test takers. Of course when I logged in and tried to book the day I wanted had no slots 🙂 So I booked a time later in the week.

As mentioned, this being the first time I had carried out a proctored exam from home, and so I was therefore keen to ensure that I checked in with plenty of time and carried out all the required checks. In all this took about 10 minutes and I was underway with the exam in no time.

The exam itself is a straight 60 questions (single / multiple choice) over 150 minutes. Obviously I cant go into details about the exam but it is fair to say there is a fair bit of concentrated reading required. I was complete in just over 2 hours with time for a decent review.

My impressions of the exam were that most of the time there were sensible answers but every so often a question came up that had me doubting and re-reading the question and wondering how best to answer. In those cases I was relying on my experience and instinct.

At the end when I clicked the finish button the result that I passed appeared immediately. None of this agonising wait whilst the Test Centre PC grinds and eventually shows the result.

As an added bonus for passing the Design exam my status as VMware Implementation Expert was also renewed.