This morning I sat the VCP5-IaaS exam and am very pleased to say I passed it and with a pretty good score too! I decided to do the exam as I have been busy with a number of vCloud engagements and had a spare few days to prepare and get it done whilst the ability to gain the VCP5-Cloud if you have the VCP5-DCV was still available.
Resources
My preparations for the exam were fairly short as I only had two weeks of solid study before sitting the exam, that’s not to say I didn’t have a solid understanding of vCloud prior and I have been working with vCloud since the 1.0 days and have done a number of vCloud design and deployment engagements. The resources I used for the exam are as follows:
– The Trainsignal VMware vCloud Director Essentials videos by David Davis. I used these videos quite a while ago when they first came out which helped me gain a very good base knowledge and used a few of the videos again as the VCP5-IaaS exam is based on vCloud 1.5 and I have been using vCloud 5.1 most recently so needed to try remember/block out a few things.
– I also used the Trainsignal VMware vCloud Director Organizations set of training videos done by Jake Robinson. These are also based on vCloud 1.5 but give a great view of how an organisation administrator would do tasks.
– I used a third set of Trainsignal videos for my preparations were the VMware vCloud Director 5.1 Essentials set of videos by VCDX #104 Chris Wahl. These are for vCloud 5.1 whereas the test is vCloud 1.5 but the videos were brilliant and Chris explains vCloud networking amazingly which is the hardest part to get your head around in vCloud.
– For the above three sets of videos I followed along whilst doing it all in my lab and would HIGHLY recommend doing it this way as I don’t think you can understand vCloud without actually doing it yourself.
– Paul McSharry created three practice test for the VCP5-Iaas which can be done here VCP5-IAAS Practice Test 1, Test 2 and Test 3. These were great as a last minute practice test late yesterday to make sure I wasn’t missing anything.
– VMware vCenter Chargeback Manager is a big portion of the exam and I used the VMware vCenter Chargeback Fundamentals course to get my knowledge up to speed on the product. This course is really good and massively important as if you haven’t used Chargeback before you will be lacking in the exam.
– We did a few of the VCP5-IaaS objectives on the EMEA vBrownbag and I watched these as the way the guys cover the components are extremely helpful. They can be downloaded from iTunes here
– Lastly I used the vCloud Architecture Toolkit (vCAT) pdf’s which I read through and made sure I understood it all. This was probably a bit of overkill as the VCP5-IaaS exam is the entry level exam whereas the vCAT is geared more towards the CIA and CID but it gave me a great holistic view of how everything worked so if you have the time I would recommend reading them or at some of them.
The Exam
Due to my last two exams being the VCAP5-DCA and VCAP5-DCD I was used to having to burn through the exam/questions so having to go through the 85 questions was quite refreshing and the exhibits and questions were also fairly straight forward. I finished quicker than I thought I would which I put down to being used to the VCAP exams pace and felt the questions were easier than the ones for example were in the VCP5 (DCV).
Conclusion
Good luck to anyone looking to do the exam. I felt it was really fair although I may still be in a VCAP mind-set and is much shorter than the VCP5-Cloud so if you have your VCP5 already then I would say go for this whilst the “upgrade” path is still available. For me I think I am done for quite a while now and will be focusing on slowly building my VCDX design for a future submission.
Gregg
TheSaffaGeek 
June 21, 2013 at 1:16 pm
Congratulations and thanks for sharing. i’ll be sitting this exam any time soon, so it is always great to find such resources.
Carlo
June 24, 2013 at 10:46 am
Thanks =0) I hope it helps you and good luck for the exam!!
June 21, 2013 at 5:22 pm
Congradulations!
June 24, 2013 at 10:46 am
Thanks =0)
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August 10, 2013 at 4:35 am
congrats and thanks for sharing your experiences!
Could you also elaborate on the training requirements for VCP, VCAP exams – what I heard is that authorized training is a must before taking the exam.
I realize things are laid out in the VMware certification path – but hope to tap on your experience thru the CERT journey.
for example – the economical way of gaining authorized training (online, self-paced) resources you may know.
August 12, 2013 at 10:58 am
Hi,
Thanks 🙂 For the VCP you do have to do authorised training, this is normally not a requirement if you are a current VCP in the previous version and are looking to do the next version within the first six months of it being released. This period had passed now for the VCP5 so you will have to go on training at an official authorized training centre before doing the exam. if you do the exam without the course you will not be given the accreditation.
VCAP really depends on what your current skills are and what you do in your day job. I listed the courses i did in my VCAP pages on this blog (accessible from drop downs at the top of the page) and also where you feel you need strengthening in your knowledge. For the VCAP exams there is no requirement of an exam to gain the accreditation BUT they are beneficial if you can get on them. there are great CBT courses from trainsignal that do the same as the official course and more at points so i would recommend those.
If you are a VMware partner there are loads of self paced courses you can watch and there are the VMware Hands On labs which you can watch and learn from. Also there are the vBrownbag’s which are community run webcasts covering most of the varying VMware exam objectives which you can watch in your own time.
There are also loads of great books out there which I have listed on my pages.
Good luck