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VCAP-DCA Exam

Duncan Epping · Jun 28, 2010 ·

I was “fortunate” enough to be part of the group of people who were invited to do the VCAP-DCA exam. Some of the others like Jason Boche and William Lam who recently did this exam already shared their experience. The VCAP-DCA Exam is the follow up to the VI-3 Enterprise Exam which I passed two years ago as part of my VCDX Journey. I must say that my experience was different than some others mentioned. No lag, no overlay issues… everything worked perfectly well. I guess one thing to keep in mind when you experience issues like that is that this exam is still beta, there is a reason there is a beta period even for exams!

Of course I can’t share any specifics with you regarding the questions as the VMware Certification Team would have to kill me if I would. However I do want to stress, and I guess that Jason and William had a similar experience, that this was seriously one of the most difficult tests I have done so far. The range of products (vCenter, ESX, vMA, vShield, Orchestrator, PowerCLI, Heartbeat) is huge which makes it really difficult to prepare for this exam. Keep in mind though that no one expects you to know the full range of products in-depth, but they do expect you to know how to solve things or how to set-up things. This could be particularly difficult with products like vShield, Orchestrator and Heartbeat. For me particularly this was a challenge as I tend to focus more on the architectural side these days, I guess being a technical consultant / implementation specialist would definitely help!

I guess the one reason you are reading this article is to make sure you prep well, here are some tips:

  1. Read the VCAP-DCA blueprint!
  2. L A B T I M E. Make sure you get enough time to spent in your lab. I can’t stress this enough as the test is 95% Lab based as opposed to the VI3 Enterprise exam which was roughly 40% Lab based.
  3. Make sure you are familiar with vMA, PowerCLI, ESX, vCenter(and all the features like vDS, vSwitches, Host Profiles, VUM etc…), Heartbeat, Orchestrator, vDR and all the rest that you can think off.
  4. Make sure you are familiar with the command line:
    1. esxcfg-* commands or the vMA equivalents (vicfg-*)
    2. esxcli
    3. PowerCLI
    4. vifp
    5. vmware-cmd
  5. Did I already mention Lab Time?

Related

Various exam, training, vcap, vcap-dca, vcxd

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Chris Dearden says

    28 June, 2010 at 19:56

    I had Similar Experiences to Jason and William (http://jfvi.co.uk/2010/06/17/vcap-dca-beta-experience/) but I think everyone is in agreement that its a seriously challenging exam !

  2. Rick Boyett says

    29 June, 2010 at 20:18

    I didn’t get a beta invite this time around. However, after reading this, maybe that was for the best.

    Fortunately I just put the finishing touches on my home lab. I think I’ll probably take the test in August unless work keeps me too busy..

    Thanks for the information..

  3. manish says

    30 June, 2010 at 21:45

    I did the exam on Monday and was not able to finish it within time as the whole environment was so slow that every single task was taking more than 2 minutes to finish. But found it very exhaustive though. Covering most of the topics as Duncan mentioned and which includes other components as well such as Update Manager and FT – you just have to get hands on everything you know about vmware -except the products such as lab manager and other which are not part of blue print.

  4. Ben Thomas says

    2 July, 2010 at 18:29

    Interesting, I didn’t expect them to add some of the products like orchestrator and PowerCLI since they are “addons” and not necessarily part of the core products. Better study those! Thanks for the update!

  5. tietzjd says

    19 July, 2010 at 18:24

    I am newer VCP working towards his VCDX4 and when I 1st read the VCAP-DCA blueprint I knew that was the 2nd test I wanted to take. You are verifing that for me 🙂 .

    My 1st goal since I work ton on the design side is the VCAP-DCD. I am hoping to get feed back on that test before VMworld so I know where to focus my Lab time. My focus right now is vShpere Design/Support and upgrades to vShpere.

    Also going for advance traning in VMware view and SRM.

  6. Jay Scmidt says

    21 September, 2010 at 03:49

    Did you have the PDFs available? This says they are, from VMware’s exam team

    http://blogs.egroup-us.com/?p=2573

  7. Duncan Epping says

    21 September, 2010 at 07:48

    No I did not, but that changed after I did the exam. Now people have them available,

  8. John Yarborough says

    22 October, 2011 at 14:30

    Duncan, just wanted to say thanks for all the valuable insight you provide to the VMware community. I know during the past few years since being thrown into a small datacenter administrator role I have referenced your articles numerous times. I just took the VCAP-DCA yesterday and because of the knowledge you share I felt a lot more comfortable in front of that lab than I would have doing it just from personal study. Thanks again and keep up the good work!

    • Duncan Epping says

      22 October, 2011 at 15:04

      Thanks for the great compliment!

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About the author

Duncan Epping is a Chief Technologist in the Office of CTO of the Cloud Platform BU at VMware. He is a VCDX (# 007), the author of the "vSAN Deep Dive", the “vSphere Clustering Technical Deep Dive” series, and the host of the "Unexplored Territory" podcast.

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