Passed the VCP5 exam today!

I finally got around to taking the VCP5 exam today and passed with 472 out of 500 points (94%). That's one more for the collection, VCP3-4-5, not too shabby! I should go out and buy something...

Finally the VCP4 certification Welcome Kit arrived

Today, the official VCP4 certification arrived in the mail. Six months(!) did it take for VMware to send the papers. There's no visible sign on the certification to indicate that it was taken as part of the beta exam - except for the date in the lower left corner (July, 16th 2009) indicating that it was achieved before the official release in August 2009.

As a bonus, a free license for Workstation 7 was included in the package which is pretty cool.

I passed the VCP 4 beta exam!

Hurrah! This Monday I received an email notification from VMware stating that I have passed the VCP4 beta exam on vSphere 4 that I took on July, 16th. For that I got a fancy little VCP button to wear at VMworld ;-) The email notification only mentioned that I passed and then a formal score report will be sent next week...

VCP4 Beta exam

Today, I took the VCP4 Beta exam. And last chance to take is tomorrow. I was lucky to get an invitation, as I fulfilled the two prerequisites: 1. to be a VCP and 2. to have participated in the vSphere 4 beta program. However, I had my doubts about taking the exam as it was announced rather suddenly and it gave me less than two weeks to study for it. But I thought, what the heck, let's study hard for two weeks and then see what happens...

The exam was quite tough, there were more questions than there will be in the final test. Because I'm a non-native English speaker, I got an extra 30 minutes. But still, 270 minutes is not much for 270 questions! That's one question per minute for 4½ hours straight and no breaks... The exam is covered by the NDA so I can't go into details, but I'm glad I reviewed the configuration maximums and then I should have spent more time on resource management (resource pools), iSCSI, paravirtualization, NPIV, and storage.

For study material, I've used:

• What's New in VMware vSphere 4 book (that you get on the what's new training course)
• VCP4 exam blueprint
• vSphere documentation bundle
• misc info on professionalvmware.com
• Simon Long's practice exam

And now, we just have to wait 6-8 weeks to get the results...