My VCAP5-DCD experience

Last week I sat the VMware Certified Advanced Professional exam for Datacentre Design, and I wanted to share my VCAP5-DCD experience.

Firstly, I need to point out that my final score was 290. The pass mark is 300 out of 500, so I was very close to passing. I plan on re-taking the exam so that I can pass, but my experiences from the exam will help me in my next try, and so I hope they help you too. The understanding of components of the exam that I gained from actually sitting the exam is something that I did not feel that I gained from other sites offering assistance with the VCAP5-DCD.

An overview of the exam

There are many other sites that assist in preparing for the exam, but I wanted to share my VCAP5-DCD experience of parts that others don’t cover.

There are 100 questions, and you have just under 4 hours to complete the test. Many people say they run out of time, but I managed to complete the exam with 40 minutes to spare (perhaps that’s why I failed!).

The questions can be long and complex, and are not like the VCP exam where it is based on memory and breadth of knowledge. The skills you need for the exam are time management, understanding of the material and comprehension of the question.

Various people said that you can or you cannot go back to questions. This may vary with your experience. I was able to flag questions for review, so was able to go back and check them. Next time I will flag all the design questions and triple check them… – Update! Apparently the Back button and Review Flagged options are back for good.

The exam format

There are 4 types of question;

• Question and multiple choice answer (e.g. choose 3 from the following 5 answers)
• Question and single choice answer
• Drag and Drop
• Design

The multiple choice questions are similar in format to the VCP exam and most other exams (see below, question format). The other two types of question are unique (in my experience) to the VCAP exam.

Drag and Drop questions

I got about 6 drag and drop questions, and these can score high marks. Whilst I was studying for the exam, I could not find any definition of what this drag and drop would look like, and what sort of questions were in this format. So, the Drag and Drop questions were new to me. Without covering what the questions actually contained (you sign an NDA before doing the exam), here is my summary of what the VCAP-DCD Drag and Drop questions were like;

• Read a few paragraphs about a business issue, from the 8 issues, categorise and drag them into the 5 boxes for; risk, constraint, assumption, requirement and capability
• You need to achieve a task for a change to your datacentre; drag 6 of these 8 activities into the correct order. Starting with “place host into maintenance mode” and including “insert new hardware” etc.
• Read the interview responses from various managers and team leaders; identify the compatible concerns and categorise them into the boxes

My tips for the drag and drop questions are that you really need to read the question carefully (there may be tiny points in the question or supporting exhibit that rule out one of the options), and also to read the instructions – for example, only select 6 out of 8 tasks… I also found that in some cases there was not room for me to fit 5 options into one box, which indicated to me that there should only be 4 items categorised into each box.

For each drag and drop question, you get asked to confirm if you are ready to submit your answer.

Design questions

There is a lot of emphasis on the design questions, where they score a large chunk of your points. It is described as Visio-style, but it’s quite restrictive in that you have a palette of items and connections, not full Visio capabilities like resize or changing of connection points. I recommend watching the interactive Flash video of the design tool from the VMware website, however this only shows you how to use the tool and not what they expect a correct answer to look like.

On some of my design questions, the scenario pointed out that the existing hardware has 2 network cards, and when doing the design there was only “room” for two of the network card icons, however if I was designing it to meet the customer requirements, I would have added more. This threw me a bit, as there was no “room” for me to put in what I wanted. So, I needed to provide the “VMware” answer instead of my own solution.

In another question, I needed to put in a datastore into a RAID group, and the datastore icon was very small – where there was more space for more datastores in the RAID object. However, the instructions only mentioned one datastore, so I don’t know if there was an expectation to add in more objects. In a real-world design, these sorts of issues would more clearly identified and may not be majorly significant and could be changed during the project – but in an exam where each component on the screen earns points, I was concerned that I would miss out on points for something that I consider to be minor in a high level design.

I found that there was a lot of clicking required when adding links – you have to keep going back to the “add” button and navigating up to the connections area. In one design I think there were around 40 connections, and to me that seemed very busy and messy and I had doubts if that is what was wanted by VMware. On another question, I did not know if they expected every port group to have an active and standby connection to the two network cards or not – it was not defined in the question, whereas other details had been. If you know what is expected, please let me know in the comments below!

One of my design questions had components that were not asked for in the 2 page description of the design requirements. However,  all the other design questions I had only gave the components that were required – so all of them were needed. This threw me a bit, and I did not know what was expected, based on the description given.

I made the mistake of re-arranging some components that had connections to others. It auto-arranged somehow and really messed it up so that I could not click on one of the items as it was almost off the screen. I had to start over for this one – but at least I knew where I was going to end up.

Multiple Choice question format

Most of the questions are in multiple choice format. They often had a large section of text to read, and some had exhibits which were images/screenshots, documents or designs. The questions were mostly around understanding the business and technical needs, comprehending the issue and then providing an answer that would influence or interpret a design decision. I only had 3 questions that were based on pure vSphere technical knowledge – ports and esxtop values. There were another 4 or 5 about VMware product selection, but most of the others were understanding of business needs and design.

The questions are definitely more complex than the VCP questions – a little confusing in places and less technical than the VCP. I wouldn’t say that the questions are hard – the truth is, you either know it or you don’t.

In an early question, the exhibit was a document listing a series of issues, requirements and concerns from various business managers – this same exhibit appeared in multiple questions. Next time I will read this very carefully so that I fully comprehend it, instead of what I did – which is to only seek out the bits that I needed for the question at the time.

However, one tactic that allowed me to gain more time was to read the answers before reading the question. With knowledge and skills, you may read the 5 options and notice immediately that two of them don’t match – then when you read the question you can identify the key points that help with the answer. Most of the questions are very wordy and almost all of them contain extra information that is not critical to answering the question.

Other tips

This is not an exam you can cram for.

I don’t even think you can study for this exam – it’s more of a test of understanding and comprehension than just knowledge. For this, VMware have definitely got it right, it’s a real test of ability. Even though I didn’t pass, I really enjoyed the exam, and next time I will be better prepared.

Before the exam, I was frustrated that the Blueprint, the BrownBags and guidance from everyone was very broad and seemed to cover almost everything – but now I understand. If your job is to understand business needs and translate them into designs and implement vSphere solutions, then you can expand your knowledge and be able to attempt this exam. But, if you are a vSphere senior admin and mostly focussed on technical issues, then you will find it more difficult to learn the business requirements for this exam.