VCP5 DT Exam Experience and Study Tips

Aah, it’s the exam season again for me.  I have worked on VDI design and deployments in past, currently I am associated with one of my customer for a long term VDI project.  So it made sense for me as a professional to check the Desktop track of certifications that VMware Offers, you can refer to my Certification page for more information.

So I finally decided to schedule the exam and start my study for the exam, I generally schedule my exams first and then study else I start slipping my target ;-).

First thing that I downloaded was the Exam Blueprint , this is important as you would like to know on what is that you are going to be evaluated against. I went through the blueprint and collated/collected all the helpful docs for the exam.

I took the Exam Demo , just to evaluate how well I am doing without going in for all out study, the results were OK but not great, which meant to be able to do well in the exam I have to study really hard.

As you can see in the Exam Demo there are 30 questions and it gives a fair bit of Idea of what is expected.

For preparation I built up a lab on my laptop workstation and installed View components in it. I followed this up with all the theoretical docs available for the View to brush up my knowledge on some of the how to and max/min type of questions. Look at EUC Best Practices Section of my blog which will have all the links which you need for a successful study.

One resource which was very helpful was the VMware View BootCamp I watched the videos which were available and it helped a lot, for me too much of theory reading is not good, the View Boot camp was a relief.

Now coming back to exam experience the exam went well for me and I was happy to see questions from the components which I have read and it was also matching the Blueprint. There are few areas which is very easy scoring, off course I am not going to be detailed about this as I signed NDA for this exam.
Look at these areas when reading and you will have a good score.

1)      Supported OS, DB for view components.

2)      Firewall ports.

3)      Thinapp

4)      ADM Templates

I passed with a good score and now I am VCP5-DT certified.

All the best for people writing the exam and hope the write up here helps.