Ohh I didn't know I had an outstanding question on my hangouts my bad.  I will go take a look :smileysilly:

5.5 Exam attempt and finally passed!

So I wrote my DCD for the third time yesterday and finally passed it.  My first two attempts where on 5.1, this attempt was on the 5.5 so I would know how it feels and to get a better idea of how to tweak the simulator in the future.

I found the DCD 5.5 exam a little better for a number of reasons

-  It seems more streamlined

-  I could get partial marks all the way through (Assuming I was getting at least half it right)  This is due to the drag-n-drop questions replacing the multiple choice

-  No multiple choice.  My brain has an issue with skipping a question without giving it a valid effort, even if it knows its a waste of time for 1 point.  So this helped a lot of myself at least.

The things that I found helped me a lot on this exam where the things I'm currently trying to build into a Study pack.  So hopefully I will get that done in the next little while.  Till then here is a short version:

-  Know Assumptions, Risks, Constraints, Requirements, Functional Requirements, and Non-Functional Requirements.  Know how to take a situation and break down items into these categories

-  Conceptual, Logical,  and Physical Design, know these well and how to take a situation and break down items into these categories

-  Compute, Sizing, and Calculations

-  Admission control and sizing(Calculate slot size and % based control)

-  Monster VM's and NUMA (Microsoft SQL, SAP, Exchange, ect)

-  Storage Best Practices, Fibre, iSCSI, NFS, PSP

-  Storage features,  Storage DRS, IO control ,ect.

-  Resource Pools, Child Pools

-  Networking best practices

-  NIOC

-  Autodeploy

-  Implementation steps / Implementation Plan

Overall my experience with this exam has been a great learning experience and also exhausting.  I'm glad I have finally accomplished this and look forward to finishing up my DCX track and then working towards my VCAP-DTD

Thank you all for the support and I look forward to continuing to supply content and assistant to those challenging the DCD

If anyone has any questions please let me know.

Congratulations!

Congratulations

Congratulations! I've been reading through this series of posts with interest because I'd like to create some VCAP exam prep tasks for CloudCredibility.com. Daunting task - As no one knows better than yourself! What would you think about letting CloudCred link tasks to your VirtualTiers site? I'm not exactly sure what that would look like, but I thought I'd run it by you. You've put in an incredible amount of effort, and congrats on your recent pass! You can email me directly at NGreir@VMware.com - Best, Noell (CloudCredibility.com Community Manager.)

Thanks everyone

@CloudCredManager, sure that sounds good I'll send you an email shortly.

Small update

I am currently working on a study pack along with some new questions for the simulator.  The first chapter of the study pack has been posted and is on the last page of the simulator

http://www.virtualtiers.net/EndPage.html

The rest of the chapters will hopefully come along shortly.

Dear Friends,

Thanks so much for your contribution on this site, this resource and sample question have been by far the closest thing that we can expect to get on DCD examination. I wanted to share that I cleared my DCD 5.1 yesterday in my second attempt, I had tried on October 13th, 2014 the first time and got 279. The exam was truly an eye opener and nothing similar to MS \ VCP certification, but never the less it was an experience that certainly came in handy when I sat again yesterday. one thing that I did notice was that the question pattern was different from what I got the first time, it was as follows:

18 Questions - Drag and Drop

6 Questions - Design

Remaining - Multiple Choice

I am happy to share my exam experience (please don't ask me question ) and prep notes and be part of any study groups that preparing for DCD 5.1, it will certainly help me in learning new things and re-inforcing what I have studied. Please drop me a note at rahul.stephen@gmail.com and we can discuss.

Thanks again and keep the good work going.

Dear Stephan,
Glad you passed yesterday Many congrats!!!
If you wanna share anything, you can join us on VCAP-DCD Study Group
Post whatever materials you want or any study notes.. It'll really help many of us
You can also contact Jason - JPM300- to help him creating many more example Qs on his web portal if you have some time.
Congrats again

Congratulations!! KitchenAid and Cómo poner arroba

Thanks Guys,

Wanted to share my notes with you, these are just pointers and I hope you find something useful from these.

I have joined the DCD study groups and its great to see so much enthusiasm for DCD, I wish I had found such groups earlier..... that would have made my grind easier

Kind Regards

Rahul Stephen

Congrats Stephen!!

Glad to hear you passed and some of the materials posted have been helpful in your path to the DCD

Feel free to ping us about anything or continue to contribute to the community  

I'm trying to wrap up my study pack and get some more same questions on virtualtiers.net however time has been tight recently.  So hopefully it will wrap up before the new year.

Cheers and congrats! always glad to hear success stories

Minor update

5 new Multiple choice questions submitted by Shady will be posted shortly.  I'm also getting really close to having 2 new design questions up and running.  Will post once I have them one.

Hey everyone,

I have 5 new beta questions up on the site.  They currently are not linked in till I get them tested out.  They are submitted by Shady,

Here is how to access them for the time being.  Let me know what you think or if we got any of the calculations wrong

http://www.virtualtiers.net/page20.html

http://www.virtualtiers.net/page21.html

http://www.virtualtiers.net/page22.html

http://www.virtualtiers.net/page23.html

http://www.virtualtiers.net/page24.html

http://www.virtualtiers.net/page25.html

Hi Jason,

Great to see your support for Community and also preparation docs for DCD Exam.

I'm lucky to be part of Goolgle DCD Study group and thanks for your efforts to prepare this material.

Hi JPM300 , do you have the link to test all the design question as per your post

Hey Khadafee, Not sure which post your referring to?

www.virtualtiers.net has some practice design questions that are similar to what the test has but are different enough that VMware allows them

If you run through the site by click on the next button on the bottom right hand part of the screen it should take you to all the other questions.  At the end of the simulator there is a Study Pack which I'm creating www.virtualtiers.net/EndPage.html

Just click on the "here"  its a link to the doc

Minor Update to the site

The Study Pack Doc at the end now has NIOC chapter finished with a practice test question which will make it into the simulator when I get a chance.

Sorry for the lack of updates, life has been keeping me busy, however stuff is in the works.

With the 5.1 being retired shortly I will be over-hauling the site a little bit.  I will be taking the current simulator and moving it into a 5.1 exam section (Retired) and reworking a new simulator for the 5.5 exam to better simulator the experience.  I will also be taking the extra questions I had in the works with MSCS, Autodeploy, and Dependencies into the new 5.5 simulator. 

So hopefully in the next few weeks I can launch the new site / simulator. 

Thanks Guys for Excellent Study Material. I passed my VCAP5-DCD