New Year and New Exam – Prepping for the VCP5

Happy New Year and welcome to 2012 and as is customary this time of year, I would like to start things out in 2012 with a New Year’s Resolution.  My resolution this year is to take the VMware VCP5 exam before the class requirement grace period comes to an end for all of us VCP4s.  When I see that someone has made a post that they passed an exam that I need to take, I have a question that immediately comes to my mind. What did you use as your reference and study material?  Since the clock is ticking for a lot of us to complete the exam, I wanted to share some of the resources that I will be using and hopefully if you have something else that you use, please comment and share your secrets.

I think most people will agree that you cannot really get started without downloading and making sure you understand everything on the VMware VCP5 Exam Blueprint. I consider this the true starting point to understand what you need to know for the exam.

I want to give a shout out and a thank you to my friends at Transignal for getting me access to Transignal’s new vSphere 5 training material.  Transignal is well known, around the industry, for having a lot of great training available and I am really looking forward to this course.

To test your knowledge, VMware has a mock exam available on their website that is worth a look. While I was preparing for the VMware VCP4 exam I came across Simon Long’s Blog and his practice tests were second to none. Simon has VCP5 Practice Exams available on his website. I should not need to say this but, just a reminder that these practice questions are NOT the real questions from the exam.

Andrea Mauro has created some study guides for all the things you will need to know for the exam.  I have heard nothing but good things about Andre’s study guides which can be found here.

Simon Greaves has done a brilliant series of postings all about new features in vSphere 5 and what he believes you should know to prepare for your VCP5. Part 1 ,Part 2 and Part 3 have all been posted and give some great tips and resources about vSphere 5.

Scott Vessey of vmwaretraining.blogspot.com recently passed his VCP5 exam and has given some brilliant insight into the format of the exam and what to expect in his posting here. He has also done a great resources page here all about the VCP5 exam.

I came across a great graph from the guys at MalaysiaVM showing the varying edition and what features you get with each that is well worth sharing.

This is my foundation on what I am going to use to prepare for the exam.  If you have other resources that you will be using, please share and good luck on the test!!