I am delighted to share that I’ve successfully passed VCAP-DCV Deploy 2019! And this is the 2nd VCAP I have received for the DCV (Data Center Virtualization) track after receiving VCAP6.5-DCV Design Autumn last year so that means I’m certified with the VCIX6.5-DCV badge although I think its changed officially to VCIX-DCV 2019.
Its been a long journey, way too long but I’m delighted to have finally achieved this goal I set myself.
The purpose of this blog post is not to cover my study approach for the exam, that is covered extensively in another post (early next week). In this post I wanted to share my experiences with exam day itself. This was my first VMware Deploy type exam so I was quite green and learned a lot of tough lessons in the process so thought I would share these in order to pay back to the vCommunity.
This exam took me 3 visits to the nearest Pearson Exam Centre and 2 attempts at the exam itself.
Visit 1 to Pearson Exam Centre
The Pearson exam centre is the first element you need to come to terms with. The Deploy Lab certification exams are not run as regularly as the VCP style exams. There is a higher bandwidth requirement and what I didn’t realise is that you can contact your local Pearson centre and get tech support to validate that the lab is fully functional in advance of hopping into you car later than week before attending. I learned this lesson the hard way as I was preparing/practicing hard over the summer for over 4 weeks to be ready to attend the exam before my Summer Holiday (a full week before). When I got to the exam centre the lab would not start. It failed to start due to licensing issues! And unfortunately it wasn’t resolved in time to sit before holidays. I was not impressed to say the least! But received a voucher for my troubles along with a genuine apology as well as a promise to verify lab is 100% ready before attending again.So save yourself some stress and phone the centre the week before or few days before to ensure no issues exist with the lab.
Visit 2 to Pearson Exam Centre
September came about and I warmed up again for lab exam mode. This was my first attempt at the exam itself. Boy did I get a rude awakening. I made a complete horses ar$e of the exam 🙂 I definitely knew enough content to pass IMO but because of poor exam technique I crashed and burned. Here are the harsh lessons I learned;
- Failure to understand exam question styles: If you have read my post on study approach you’d have seen the study guides and exam experiences but for some reason there was one basic item I failed to grasp. I thought you would get asked troubleshooting tasks and get asked configuration tasks. I didn’t realise what you get asked on a significant proportion of the questions is a combination. You get asked to configure an item but you can’t because the lab is broken and you need to resolve the issue prior to the configuration task. I lost a good bit of time thinking their was a fault with the lab as I knew how to do something but in reality it was broken on purpose. Know the pre-requisites and dependencies for features as you will need to know this to resolve issues in the lab in order to proceed to the actual configuration task asked.
- Don’t Rat-Hole: This was another lesson which i thought I learned as a child but clearly ignored come exam day. If you are struggling with a question for too long, do not rat-hole digging deeper and deeper doing Root Cause Analysis, move on. I lost lots of time on a couple of questions I wouldn’t move past because of ego. Some tasks are quicker than others but in the general sense there are 17 questions and 205 minutes to complete them so spending 20 minutes on a question for example like I did, is too long.
- Keep track of where you configure what: This is another rookie mistake. There are a number of vCenter’s at play here. They were named very similar but for a letter in the difference and for some reason (probably due to it being a Virtual Lab) the font was quite faint and didn’t notice which vCenter was defaulting in the drop down. Watch this..I wasted another bit of time thinking I was going mad not able to find where I created or configured a certain item. I was embarrassingly in the wrong vCenter. Haha told you I learned some harsh lessons.
- Don’t drink a can of Monster: Again for some reason I really over analysed this exam thinking I wouldn’t be alert enough being in such a long exam so had the brain child to drink a can of Monster before the exam. Not a good idea! I was beginning to panic a slight bit with losing so much time around the place but the can of Monster multiplied gave that even more legs so was not comfortable at all so was counter productive. If you want to ensure your concentration is optimal just do the basics right by getting a good night sleep and don’t book the exam in the afternoon, book it AM instead.
- Review the questions first: This was another mistake. You can go back and forth in the exam lab guide. I wish the first time I did the exam I surveyed the all the questions to determine the topic, level of difficulty and whether I had covered the topic in my studies. Instead I started straight in and the first few questions were much longer than the last few. I was kicking myself with time running out that I was leaving some low hanging fruit (questions) unanswered that I 100% would have completed. Sometimes you have to experience something once at least to get a clear understanding of approach.
I finished the exam in a pretty frustrated state realising I knew I could have done much better than I did making some rookie mistakes. The result came back just less than 2 weeks later and I failed not surprisingly. I dusted myself off and took my lessons learned into my 2nd attempt and 3rd visit to the Pearson Exam Centre
Visit 3 to Pearson Exam Centre
My 2nd exam attempt had to wait a little bit longer than I would have liked before I could sit it at the end of November. There were some large work projects that swamped my time in hours and out of hours at times so getting in the right head space for a 210 minute lab was a challenge.
This time around I did follow all the DO’s
- Get enough sleep
- Understand the exam questions you will be asked
- When the exam starts review all questions to understand and categorise difficulty etc
- Manage time correctly and move on if stuck
- Concentrate on where you configure what within the exam lab environment and be very familiar with Hands-On lab
And DO NOT
- Drink a can of Monster right before the exam 😉 Haha
What’s next?! hmm Going to enjoy my Christmas party tonight and take a break from studying at least for Christmas..Afterwards I need to have a serious think if I want to take on VCDX in 2020. A more short term goal is VCP-NV (for NSX-T) as I completed the ICM course recently and want to branch my current focus around HCI with SDN.
I hope this helps somebody out there by learning from some my “learnings” we’ll call them.
As always the usual Disclaimer
[…] you will pass! Your exam day technique is critical to success too. I covered this is another post here so ensure you heed those warnings/tips […]