My VCAP6.5-Design Experience

This past weekend I sat for and successfully passed the VCAP6.5-Design exam. It was great to finally pass an exam on the first go (I’ve had a torrid run recently, that’s going to be another post on its own). Here’re some details about the exam environment, my experience and suggestions for future takers.

Exam center:

When booking the exam I needed to find a center that offered exams on the weekend. Turns out Aviation Training Service Victoria in Airport West was the only one that offered Saturdays and Sundays. I booked an 8am appointment for the exam, I thought I rocked up nice and early at about 7.40, lo and behold the parking was full as. The center also offers CPA training (bit strange for an aviation training company!) and testing services, the Sunday was the day about 50 candidates were already there busily poring through their notes and tomes for their exam. I wandered around the center and saw the area where they train people up to service flying craft. I took two pictures of some dusty old things that probably used to fly years ago:

 

Exam environment:

Most welcome change is the Visio-style questions are gone. It’s all multiple choice (choose one/two/three etc) or drag and drops. The exam environment had a good feel about it all. I found the layout better, nothing was wonky, all the drag and drops were spot on. Flicking between questions painless too, the drag and drop choices I made stayed put. I had 22″ monitor which may helped too with not having to scroll the screen (David Stamen’s had some issues, maybe his monitor was smaller?), I had no UI issues whatsoever. It might just be a good idea to find a center with larger screens? There were 2-3 questions in which the choices were so ambiguously worded (I left comments there) that you could go with multiple choices and I just couldn’t pin-point the answer.

You get 60 questions to do in 140 mins. You can mark questions for review and come back to them later. I marked 6 of them for review, however the review screen didn’t actually let me pick the ones I marked for review, it was review all or none. Bit strange I thought or perhaps I just didn’t hit the right buttons..

Study material:

Not bragging by an stretch, I went in with no study whatsoever, just on the job experience and of course the past 1.5 years spent on preparing for the VCDX. It showed too. The design based questions were a breeze, however I wasn’t quite sure of some of the migration-to-6.5 type questions, made educated guesses and kept going. I passed with a 371, not a stellar score, but not bad either. Anything about 299 is great with me.

Tips:

Here’re some tips while hoping to stay within the realms of the NDA:

• Read the drag and drop questions carefully. In some questions, one word tipped the answer in favour of a different choice. Be very careful. For me, it helped reading through the answer choices once too. So, read the question carefully (and again if required), read the answer choices, read the question, choose the answer.
• Take it easy, there’s plenty of time. I took all my time, I had about 10 mins left at the end of the first drive-by. Reviewed one question I had marked, changed the answer to another question I had not marked, then spent then next few minutes trying to figure out how to review the others I had marked before I gave up and sat there waiting for the time to run out.
• Know your AMPRS really well. Again, be careful reading the choices as they can be similarly worded.
• Know your Risks, Assumptions, Constraints and Requirements really really well. You gotta know what stands an assumption apart from say a constraint. A customer’s current backups software is X – that’s a constraint. The current intersite link is 2Gbps and will be good enough to support future requirements – that’s an assumption. All VMs must perform x, y and z – that’s a requirement.
• Is a requirement functional or non-functional? You need to be able to differentiate between the two.
• Drum into your head how PSCs work and how design decisions affect vInfrastructure management. Know how to step your way through a move from 5.x to 6.5 (all aspects of the move!). Know the architectural differences between 5.x and 6.5 and how design decisions affect manageability of various components or introduce some sort of risk to something.

Recommendations:

If you don’t work in an architectural capacity, read the fairly exhaustive list prepared by Hersey Cartwright here.

Run through the vBrownbag series for vSphere Design.

Run through the vSphere Design Cookbooks people like Scott Lowe and Hersey have written here and here respectively.

Wrap-up:

With passing the above exam, I now have: