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JasonV1
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Passed VCP5 - thoughts

I did a small yet vague (has to be) writeup here: http://www.vjason.com/2011/08/29/vcp5-exam-passed/

My overall opinion is that if you felt like you could pass the VCP4 exam today, and you spent a good 12-16 hours going through vSphere 5 features, setup, maybe some upgrades you would be well on your way to passing the VCP5. Helping me out is 3.5 total years of vSphere experience, ~1.5 with 4.X and 2 with 3.5, including deployment and upgrades in both cases.

If all you have done is administer existing farms I recommended that you set up a lab and go through all the heavily used features such as DRS, HA, FT, VUM (including host upgrades), some vCLI interaction, distributed vswitches, resource pools, shares, limits, vApps, and so on. Worried about not having any shared storage experience? Download a EMC VNX VSA appliance here and you'll be able to mimic a very real world setup from the hosts to the storage (NetApp makes a VSA as well but is isn't publicly available). Refer to the exam blueprint if you need ideas of additional topics to study.

Having taken both the 410 and 510 exams I can say that they felt similar. Of 85 questions I marked 10 for review, and upon review I felt confident of my answers for almost all of them. I spent about 90 minutes in total on the exam.

My 2 cents: The exam is fair and I suspect that over the next few months we will see a flood of VCP5's.

- Jason

Was my post helpful? If so please remember to award points by using the Helpful/Correct buttons. Twitter: http://twitter.com/jasonventresco Blog: http://vjason.com
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6 Replies
weinstein5
Immortal
Immortal

Great advice - Thanks!

And congratulations!

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JasonV1
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Thanks!

Now the only question is what is my number and was I the first at my workplace to pass. I know that the VCP5 beta exam testers haven't even learned their results yet; that would kill me.

Was my post helpful? If so please remember to award points by using the Helpful/Correct buttons. Twitter: http://twitter.com/jasonventresco Blog: http://vjason.com
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weinstein5
Immortal
Immortal

Be prepared if you are already a VCP 4 (or earlier) your VCP number will not change - at least that is my experience I have the same VCP number as my VCP 2 - 

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JasonV1
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Figures. Although in all honestly I just wanted to get it out of the way long before February.

I guess if I want the low numbers I have to shoot for the other exams.

Was my post helpful? If so please remember to award points by using the Helpful/Correct buttons. Twitter: http://twitter.com/jasonventresco Blog: http://vjason.com
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AndreTheGiant
Immortal
Immortal

Now the only question is what is my number and was I the first at my workplace to pass. I know that the VCP5 beta exam testers haven't even learned their results yet; that would kill me.

About the number, as written, they are generic VCP number (as also VCDX are generic, and probable also the VCAP-XXX).

About the beta, yes still no results (but was the same also with the beta of VCP4 and other betas).

Again, congrats for the pass and thanks for sharing.

Andre

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro
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RajuVCP
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Congrats Jason ! 

With your  Views on the VCP 5 exam, am now exiceted to soon go for the Exam, starting on the Blue Print and doing hands on vSphere 5.0.

Regards

Raju Gunnal

http://www.tech2solution.com/forum

Raju Gunnal VCP 4, VCP 5, VTSP 4, VTSP 5, ITIL V3 http://www.techtosolution.com
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