So I realize everyone and their brother has blogged on VCP 5 study recommendations….but I thought I’d just put mine out as well as I passed back in December. I was planning to study up over Christmas/New Year’s until I discovered that most testing centers in my area were shutting down for 3 weeks….so I scheduled my VCP5 exam about 2 days out and crammed Sunday evening and some Monday.
From a general perspective, having done vSphere implementations in a previous (recent) life definitely helps. As well, over the last several months I’ve done 5+ vSphere 5 updates for customers (based off Jason Nash’s excellent webinar done for Varrow back in August). The slide deck for that does a great job of covering the high-level technical details of what’s new in vSphere 5. Link here.
Note: I’d love to come do a vSphere 5 + SRM walkthrough for anyone interested…great stuff to talk about.
Beyond that, what I covered in something of a cram session was….
- VCP5 Mock Exam — I actually did this first just to see how well I did/get a feel for how close/far I was.
- What’s New Docs — I read all of these to refresh me on all the high-level stuff that’s new/changed. I didn’t want to start with the long docs lest I get lost in the weeds. This does overlap with Forbes’ doc below but I wanted to cover first and separately….just how I learn/think.
- Cosonok’s blog — http://cosonok.blogspot.com/search/label/vSphere5
- I went through all of part 1 (some stuff in there is off though), ignored part 2 (see below), skimmed part 3.
- vSphere Maximums doc — skimmed through all of that. I’ll echo everyone else that VCP 5 is not about maximums though.
- Forbes Guthrie monster doc — he summarizes ~2000 pages of docs in there….insane. I got through almost all of this and highly recommend it.
- VCP5 Study Notes — I ran out of time to use this….seemed to have a lot of links to other stuff (unlike Forbes doc which is a TON of content)….could be helpful though.
For studying, it’s just me but I tend to print stuff out duplexed and walk around with the pages…reading through them and putting down as I go through each….keeps me off the computer (i.e. distractions) and keeps the blood flowing more than sitting down.
And last but not last least, a general test-taking tip: this may not work for you but I always take tests the same way — first time through I answer each question as quickly as I can, flag the ones I’m not sure of (Alt-F to flag, Alt-N to advance – one hand on the keyboard, one hand on the mouse), flag the ones that take me more than 30-60 seconds to answer due to uncertainty. Hopefully that gets some momentum/confidence going…then at the end I review any incomplete and/or flagged questions for as long as feels right. Using this approach I’ve yet to have issues with running out of time on a test.
Hope this helps someone pass!
Think Meta 
Thanks for the mention of my site.
LikeLike
Quite welcome….appreciate your making your work/notes available…
LikeLike