Accepted Solutions
Hi,
I use VMware workstation in my 8 GB RAM laptop. Not the best but enough to get to test lots of things.
It's important to play a little bit with things like networking, vCenter, Storage adapters, host profiles, update manager, resource pools, HA and DRS, vMotion, storage vmotion (thins like having machines with snapshots and vmotion them, etc).
The ideal configuration for me would be to have 2 esxi hosts (they could be virtual if your enviroment allows that), 1 shared storage (like openfiler), 1 vCenter, 1 Active Directory.
You won't be able to test everything, obviously but this should get you going. It worked for me.
Take a look at VCP blueprint in order to know what is going to be expected from you in the test (like be sure they are going to ask about dVS before testing that or if it got updated with things like Web Client, VSA, etc). Break things 
fixing them it's the best way to learn. Get active in the community, you will help others and hopefully you will also learn a lot from very experienced people...I'm learning quite a lot actually
Get familiar with configuration maximums and if you have the chance to read some book like "cram exam" (I don't remember the name right now), that's really helpful.
Good luck!
elgreco81