My review of the VCAP-DCA exam

[scott28tt]

I've taken the VCAP-DCA exam today, and posted a review to my blog, I hope you'll find it useful

http://vmwaretraining.blogspot.com/2011/07/vcap-dca-exam-review.html

Scott.

[AndreTheGiant]

Thanks for sharing. And good luck for the result.

Andre

[ericvandermeer1]

Thanks for sharing this with us!

I will read it for my upcoming DCA exam.

Best regards,

Eric van der Meer

[bobby311]

Well this post finally made me realize that until I actually sit for the exam I will never be fully prepared.

As with what Scott said I have a lot of VMware experience from esx 3 till now but there are just some products that I just don't use regularly or at all (Orchestrator, vShield, FT, scripted installs).

All you can really do is run through the blueprint, brush up on topics that you are not aware of and just take the test.

Just wish the price tag wasn't so steep!

[bobby311]

Scott

On the exam are the instruction direct? or are they in a problem solving story?

Example:

Configure VMA appliance as a syslog server

or

Is there a paragraph of blah blah blah and then you have to figure out that the best decision to make is to configure the VMA appliance as a syslog server?

[scott28tt]

The exam contains a mixture of different types of tasks, most of the tasks I was given had specific instructions including IP address or VLANs where relevant. You are expected to do some troubleshooting though, so you will need to think about the possible causes of a particular issue, or understand the pre-requisites in making a particular thing happen.

Scott.

[slaclair]

Thanks for the blog post, I always enjoy reading the experience blog posts.  It's a little disheartening that they're still requiring service console tasks, it has been a long time since we had a classic ESX box in our datacenter so I've definitely have been more comfortable on the ESXi/vMA side of things.

Like previously said in this topic, I don't think I'll be truely ready till I know the caliber/depth of the questions they ask.  I may just set aside $400 and write it off as an instant loss and use the exam seat time as a means to focus my study efforts properly.

Given your confidence I'm sure you passed, hopefully the next three weeks doesn't go too slow for you

[bobby311]

Another idea I had:

As soon as the exam starts open up all of the pdf's that are provided so that I quickly search for information that I need.

Would this approach have helped any one in the test?

What pdf reader is provided?

[jghartin]

I would not plan on having time to dig through documentation. There really is not much time. The 3.5 hourse seems to fly by. The docs are a "nice to have," but do not plan on using them more than a couple times. In my experience, although I passed, I skipped a couple questions and ran out of time to go back. If I were to go through docs, I would have probably had more than a couple incomplete questions. Good Luck.

Cheers,

JGH

[scott28tt]

You have the ability to open Acrobat Reader and use it to open any of the standard vSphere documentation .pdf files, BUT time in the exam is so tight that the more you have to use it the fewer tasks you will get to complete. I was surprised at how quickly the time passed in the exam, even though many people had told me that time management was a key element - I normally finish exams with masses of time to spare but you won't find many people saying that about VCAP-DCA!

Scott.