My VCAP-DCD Experience
It’s customary for the bloggers out there to talk about their certification experience. I don’t want to disappoint so here’s my story. Hope it was worth the wait!
It was a cool October morning the day after an excellent birthday evening with the family followed by some light last minute preparation. Going to bed early was definitely a great design decision which is what this exam is all about.
All kidding aside this was not an exam for the weak of heart or nerves. Unfortunately I’m prone to test anxiety regardless of my preparation. Fortunately I’ve done more than a handful of designs so I had a little bit of confidence going in.
That highlights on a key component. The content of the exam is not the whole challenge. The challenge is also in absorbing key information presented and making design decisions based on that information.
I’ll not rehash what other great contributors have provided on the subject but I will provide a couple of pointers that I thought were pertinent (and I believe NDA safe).
Preparation Thought
While reviewing the blueprint and the study materials I made a point to identify topics or technologies that I had not previously designed into an environment. Usually the environments I’ve designed for had requirements that limited my design choices. For instance, If you are designing for an environment that is running all FC SAN storage then it’s not likely you’ll be experienced with iSCSI. Your experiences play a huge part in how you prepare.
To solve this problem I took those items I was less familiar with and pretended that I did not have a requirement. I read up on that technology and argued with myself (or sometimes with another person - recommended) on how I would design with that technology. Often it came down to identifying constraints or requirements that would force you to use that solution. This led me to think outside of the framework that my experience had built. When possible I also set up that tech in my home lab I was building. This gave some base experience with unfamiliar features.
Prepping with little to no Previous Design Experience
If you have limited design experience then I suggest grabbing Visio and talking to your peers about their environments. Start with talking about their requirements, constraints, applications, utilization, and scope. From there draw up a high level logical design of what you think the environment would look like and compare it to what is actually there. Afterwards talk with your peer about their environment and why they chose what they did, especially if it was different then your logical design. This looks towards objective 2.1 and really gets you into the design mindset. http://www.seancrookston.com/2011/02/22/vcap-dcd-objective-2-1-map-business-requirements-to-the-logical-design/
The key here is to think quickly. See if you can Visio/Whiteboard it in 10 Minutes? 5 Minutes? Train yourself to think quickly and build confidence in your decisions. This falls in line with the VCAP-DCD Design Tool that is available to view from VMware myLearn. Remember that time is your enemy here so you want to be quick and confident. http://mylearn.vmware.com/courseware/82525/VCAPDCD_Tutorial.swf
What are they asking?
A common SAT testing technique is to review the answers and attempt to eliminate options so as to increase your chances of successfully answering the question. I approached nearly all questions by reading the potential answers first. Once I had a feel for the answers I read the specific question being asked. Several times the answer was very clear, other times I was still left to read much of the supportive text.
My suggestion is to always double check any supportive text for keywords regarding design choices. I figure this worked well since everything on the exam was in the blueprint as best I can recall. I found this technique effective and probably saved me some time.
How Would I Design That?
When looking at the blueprint and study materials…think “How would I design that in my environment?” As I mentioned before there are likely things that you’ve never needed to use in your designs. Identify those and spend some time going over its usage and purpose. If you’re not sure talk to some folks in the community and always remember that Google’s your buddy! Next up try a mock design with it and look for notes from someone on whether it’s correct usage.
If you gotta go, you gotta go, but the time doesn’t stop.
I knew going into this exam that there was no way I was going to make it 4 hours without a stop to the restroom. Either I have a little girl’s bladder or I drink too much but regardless I checked with the Pearson Vue folks and they informed me that any breaks are unscheduled and the timer keeps going. Suffice it to say I just planned to stop around the 2 hour mark to make it a controlled situation and I only lost a couple of minutes. I felt this was a good use of time though I completed the final question with only 2 minutes left. This let me review 2 flagged questions. Fortunately I had enough to pass and I’m now VCAP-DCD #433! VCAP-DCA here I come November 30th!
Resources
No post like this is any good without a decent list of resources so here you go:
http://www.vmwarevideos.com/vcap
http://www.seancrookston.com/vcap-dcd-index/
http://professionalvmware.com/brownbags/ - Jason Boche is choice for Objective 1.x
Community - If you are reading this then you’re probably on the right track.
