Wow! Always love that email from VMware confirming a pass. Freaking out when I got the email as the PDF viewer on my phone kept crashing, so “panic”, is this a bad sign!
5 months of study for this one. I found the VCAP-DTA a lot harder than the VCAP-DCA exam, even though I had just rolled out a major View implementation for one of our clients.
Words of wisdom for the exam, study the blueprint and make sure you know every command and possible scenario that VMware could test you on. They are sneaky and some of the scenarios take longer to interrogate the question than to implement or resolve the issue. I had to sit there a couple of times and think what are you actually wanting me to do as the question was so convoluted.
I managed to get through 21 of 23 labs before running out of time, I had the usual latency bug bite me with 32 minutes remaining, and it slowed to a painful lag of at least 10 seconds per mouse click. The 3 hours for the exam goes in a flash, it’s a race against the clock for sure.
There is absolutely no time to look in the supplied PDFs, so make sure that all the command-line configurations you might be tested on are in your head. I made this a priority as part of my study regime.
Make sure you have a good lab, make sure your lab replicates the blueprint! 2 hosts, 4 Connection Servers, 3 vCenter Servers, a Security Server. I also spun up a Terminal Server and some others for manual and terminal server pools. This way you get to test all the different configurations.
Thanks to people on the interweb who have put together study guides, they are a great source of info and gives you a different perspective on subject matter, especially when there are no local study groups. I would like to give a special thanks to Steve Dunne who did an amazing job on this VCAP5-DTA study pack. What an effort to create that. Cheers Steve.
So from here, in the next month I intend on sitting a Riverbed certification, and once that is done my next major goal will be the VMware Certified Advanced Professional – Desktop Designer (VCAP5-DTD).
Musings from a past life 