VCAP6 – DCV Deploy Beta Experience

I’m a sucker for a bargain, so I signed up for the Beta for VCAP 6 – DCV Deploy once it was announced ($100 instead of $400). I know that the scoring will take a long time, but hopefully I get it before VMworld. I had also previously signed up for the VCAP 6 – DCV Design Beta but I goofed on the date and ended up missing the exam.

Let me start off by saying that I did little to no preparation for this exam, I went in cold! I did the same thing with the VCAP 5 – DCA two years ago and I barely squeaked bye. I feel that I have grown a lot in my abilities to deploy vSphere, especially with vSphere 6, so I was hoping my previous knowledge plus my new vSphere 6 knowledge would help me through.

The delivery of the exam was very familiar. It was the exact same interface of the VMware HOL. A browser is opened which gives you a console to your control desktop, a separate panel for the questions and another for other console browsers. The console connection was pretty good, no real complaints there. I did find myself having to move to the questions panel left and right in order to unblock portions of my screen. A slightly larger monitor would have helped here, but I don’t think it was a big issue. The questions do not have a ‘review later’ button, so you need to just write them down on your scrap paper.

One other oddity is that there are a few buttons that are disabled: ctrl alt backspace. The use of those keys could really bork an environment like this, so VMware disabled them. Right-click copy and paste was my friend, also on-screen keyboard to use ctrl-v in certain scenarios helped! That may have helped in other scenarios as well but I didn’t have time to try. Instead of backspace, I used a lot of arrow keys and delete.

You do have access to some offline pdfs. I had trouble searching through them (sometimes I could sometimes I couldn’t). It may have been how I was accessing them. I really got valuable info maybe one time. I searched maybe two-three other times but didn’t get anywhere. In general I think if you are at least aware of functionalities and features, you should be able to figure things out without trying to go to the docs.

Overall I had four questions that I did not answer. One i think was a bug in the system, but the other three were things that I wasn’t familiar with in my usual work. I feel pretty good overall, but you never now. Unfortunately it’s just a long waiting game now. Before the Beta was announced, I did purchase a $200 voucher to take a VCAP at VMworld. If the design exam is available, I may give that one a try.

I didn’t really study , but I did see a good recap here for those who are looking fo rmaterial:

http://davidstamen.com/certification/my-vcap6-dcv-deploy-beta-experience/

EDIT 8/29/2016:

The certification team at VMware worked wonders and scored all of the deploy tests prior to VMworld. I passed with a 377!