I passed the VCP 5 exam!

A happy day for me, indeed! I passed my VMware Certified Professional on vSphere 5 exam today in Rolla, MIssouri. I’ve been studying vSphere 5 now for about 5 months.

Because my current project is implementing vSphere 4.1 data centers, I was planning on attending the Install, Configure, and Manage course for vSphere 4.1 – I even bought the 4.1 course. Then vSphere 5 came out and my course provider, Global Knowledge, changed my 4.1 course to version 5. That was ok by me. I just changed gears and started studying for vSphere 5. I’ve been able to set up version 5 test labs at different customer sites parallel to our 4.1 implementations. The test labs have all consisted of nested ESXi boxes.

At customer sites, they sometimes had spare servers – dual-socket quad-core Xeons, 96 GB RAM, and some local storage. When I wasn’t using a single server and nesting, I used my beefy laptop: quad-core hyper threaded Intel Core i7 @2.00GHz, 8 GB RAM, and an Intel 320 series SSD, with 64-bit Windows 7 and VMware Workstation 8.

Epping and Denneman’s clustering deep dive book was a lot of help – I saw questions that would have been more difficult had I not read this book. Of course, I read through Scott Lowe’s Mastering VMware vSphere 5, too.

I read through a lot, but not all, of the VMware online documentation and PDFs. These were especially helpful.

Either way, I’m relieved to have finally passed a VCP exam. I’ve been wanting to focus some time and energy on studying for a NetApp certification and I can finally do that. Our data center implementations are using FAS3240s. I’d like to put out a blog series on setting up the NetApp DataONTAP simulator from start to finish. I haven’t seen a cradle-to-grave walk-through of the simulator yet, so I’d like to be the first one.

As always, thanks for reading.

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