Today I wrote my VCP-IaaS exam to become VMware Certified Professional – Cloud (VCP-Cloud). I studied for this exam for over a week and utilized the Diwali Holiday in India which was relatively less busy period for me as most of the people were on leave. Below is the breakdown of my exam experience, study material and tips for you to have a good chance at the exam.
Study Materials
I used the PDFs available from VMware with the lab work. The PDF links are all included in the blueprint,you can download the blueprint through your MyLearn Account see below for example.
The PDFs that I mainly used were:
- vCenter Chargeback Manager Installation & User’s Guide
- vCloud Connector Installation and Configuration Guide & Using vCloud Connector
- vCloud Director Administrator’s Guide, Installation and Configuration Guide, and User’s Guide
- vShield Administration Guide and Quick Guide
I tried to pull most of the knowledge directly from the lab (we have a virtual Lab in VMware to use 🙂 Lucky me), with the guides being helpful with questions on installation.There’s also a mock exam you can take if you want to get a feel for the questions.
Exam Format and Exam Experience
I wrote my exam at a Pearson VUE center located in my City. This was my third VMware exam at their exam center this year, I wrote my VCP5 and VCP5-DT exam earlier. The questions in the VCP-CLOUD aka VCP-IaaS exam were all multiple choice in nature, with some requiring multiple answers (choose 2 or more). There were in total 85 Questions in the exam.
The exam is really heavy on vCloud Networking and vShield Component, you need to make sure that you know this stuff in and out for having a chance in the exam. There will be few questions which will be straight out of the vCloud director interface so building a Lab is essential. These questions are like low hanging fruit which can be handled very easily if you know the interface.
Final thoughts and References
My advice? Build a lab for this exam, learn/install all the vCloud components, go through the PDFs, master the concepts. There is almost nothing related to vSphere in the exam as being a VCP5 is one of the prerequisites for this exam, so don’t have hopes on questions on vSphere. The exam blueprint has covered all the topics which you need to prepare for the exam.
I also highly recommend VMware vCloud: Deploy and Manage the VMware Cloud[V1.5] Class.
Overall, the VMware certification team has done a good job on this exam. Some of the other links I found to be helpful are below.
http://www.scoop.it/t/from-vcp5-to-vcp5-iaas by Fortunato Navarro Sanz
vCloud Ultimate Resource Guide
Hope you find it useful , all the best for the exam.
Great post Samir! I’m getting ready to take the IaaS exam here in two weeks. I do have a vSphere lab and I’ve messed around with vCD for a while now, but nothing serious. I’ll hammer out as much lab time as I can and see how it goes.
Good blog, keep up the good work.
-Greg
Thanks Greg , Glad that you like it.
One year later and still on google 🙂
Nice article, I made the mock exam without no preparation at all and took 41%, it´s something, made me excited to study…
Your article confirmed my thoughts, that following the blueprint and a good lab will be enough!!
Thx