Hello
Unfortunately I failed my first attempt with a 262 but as these communities provided a lot of good information I thought I would chip in with how I achieved my failure 
, hopefully someone else will find it useful.
The sources I used were:
- VMware official VCAP5-DCD certification book
- 2nd edition of the vSphere Design book (very valuable)
- HA/Clustering Deepdive book (this was cool)
- Attended the Design Workshop
- Watched the Brown Bags videos (as many as I could)
- Numerous blogs including: TheSaffaGeek | My ramblings about all things technical & Official VMware VCAP5-DCD Guide Reading List | Elastic Sky and many many more.
- The exam blueprint
I can confirm everything that all the other blog posts have said. This exam is tough and although 3h 45mins seems a long time, to get it all done is a big ask. The main reason for this is that the questions are very wordy. Really you want to be answering every question in less than 2 minutes, this is very hard to do. During any exam you always get told to read the question carefully and make sure you understand what they are asking. This is very true as you dont want to get caught answering what you thought they had asked but in this case you also have to read the question very fast. Then each answer can be quite lengthy too so by the time you have carefully read the question and weighed up all the answers you are probably pushing 2 minutes there. There isnt time to re-read questions so my advice: start from the bottom, read the answers first. There were a number of questions where I read then re-read the question only to find out that the very last sentence was the question and everything above could have been interchanged with any scenario. Save yourself a lot of time and read from the bottom up. Obviously if the last sentence refers to something above then carry on reading but dont automatically assume that every peace of text on the screen will be relevant to your answer.
Which brings me to the official cert guide. Although this book is a good and fairly light read, the example exam questions in this book are in no way representative of the real exam question. Be warned! The questions on the CD are all one liners. I got 95% of these correct on the first run in under an hour. The real exam questions are much longer than this.
After my exam I was very disappointed, it was a sad drive back home that day. As I was working through the exam I knew I wasnt going to make it. I expected something around the low 200's so the only glimmer of light was that I had done slightly better than I thought. The most depressing part was that I am confident with the technology but kinda new to design and looking back I couldnt think of how I could possibly improve. After that rather blue period I had a good think about my experience and Im pretty sure I can get over the 300 mark. There were whole sections I only skimmed over during my studies and those sections seem to pop up alot during the exam.
What I would ask people in this community is this. During my walk of shame back to reception to pick up my bit of paper confirming my failure there is a section at the bottom that says sections that I had "missed". Does this actually mean questions unanswered or is it a polite way of saying you got these wrong?
Ive got me exam rebooked for the end of January, fingers crossed for that and atleast I get Christmas off.
Good Luck anyone taking this exam.
Scott
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