I'm after some much needed advice from the wise folks here on the DCD community. I have my exam booked for the first week of August and have been reading like a mad man for about 2 months. A bit of my background, I am a vSphere admin at a large cloud provider and work on vSphere 5 and 5.1 on a daily basis. All my experience with the product has been administering it and my design experience is next to nothing. I am VCAP5-DCA and ITIL v3 certified and have a slew of MS certs too. I passed the DCA with about 2 months of serious study, I did not find the exam difficult apart from the time pressure and the clunky exam environment. Because I have zilch design experience, the DCD feels like climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro.
My resources:
1. My home lab, well speced. No issues here
2. The vSphere 5 Design Workshop. Good experience. The workshop books have helped (are helping) in the preparation.
3. Epping and Denneman's Deepdive book. Read it twice for the DCA. Will read it again.
4. Storage Implementation in vSphere 5.0. Flipped through the first 2 chapters, then stopped. Great book, but too much of a deepdive for the DCD I reckon. I'll try to finish it off before the exam.
5. Managing and Optimizing vSphere 5.0 deployments. Read a few pages here and there. Not a bad book. Helps reinforce the stuff I already know.
6. The blueprint, probably the most important resource (and the most confusing one as well, so much open-ended stuff in there)
7. The billions of pdf's that the blueprint refers to. I'll try to read as many as I can
8. vBrownbags. Good stuff.
Are the above resources enough? Do I need something else? I know Gregg has a mock design going on his website and I will look at it in detail sometime soon. I cannot get design experience at work because there's nothing on the horizon.
- There was this BCD pdf I have read people mention, what's this?
- Though my company is a VMware Partner, I cannot seem to be download the Design Kit. Someone know about this would be?
I need someone to give me an example question PLEASE. I dont want you to violate the NDA at all (I'm vehemently against dumping), but I need you guys to give me a sample question. Doesnt have to be vSphere related. I just need to know what to expect, dont want to go there not knowing what I'm going to face. Knowing about the enemy is half the battle, right?! I know there's the UI Demo on vmware.com, and I have looked at it already. But I cannot find any sample questions.
A HUGE TIA!