Desktop Tested
<!--kg-card-begin: markdown--><p>Yesterday I sat for the VMware Certified Advanced Professional in Desktop Administration exam. While I would love to tell you that I passed, sadly it seems I will be sitting for the exam again soon.</p>
<p>For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to take the exam at 8AM on a Monday morning, and then not study. Add in staying up late on Sunday night to watch World War Z on Netflix and you’ve got a receipe for a rough morning.</p>
<p>But enough excuses…</p>
<p>I did read the <a href="http://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrReg/plan.cfm?plan=44696&ui=www_cert">exam blueprint</a>, as with every certfification exam this is the best starting place to find out what will be covered. In order to save myself some time I’m going to plagerize what I wrote a few months ago after taking the VCAP-DCA exam to help explain the format for the test.</p>
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<p>For the uninitiated, the test is unlike any other exam in the VMware portfolio, and unlike any other exam I’ve taken for any other certification. It is 100% lab based. You have remote access to a VMware vSphere 5.0 environment, with a vCenter, two hosts, a collection of virtual machines, and pre-provisoned storage.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>In other VMware exams, you’re given 60–70 multiple choice questions to regurgitate anwsers to. In the VCAP, you are given 26 different “projects” you have work your way though. I say projects because each of the 26 will vary in length and have multiple component problems to solve. Some may be straight foward, some far less so.</p>
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<p>In the case of this exam, the environment has more hosts and a newer version of vSphere. There are also 23 projects instead of 26. The rest of it still stands.</p>
<p>You start with 180 minutes, and half way through I thought I was making great progress, but then I ran out of time. I did feel like I was spinning my wheels a bit with lag back to the enviornment from the testing center, and there was a lack of clear direction about the environment and in some of the questions.</p>
<p>The last time I totaled up the number of View deployments I’ve either deployed soup to nuts, or done significant upgrades and management of since 2009, it was somewhere around a couple dozen. Even with that experiance, there were a couple of things on the exam that I’ve never had to do in my work and then plenty of things I was expecting to have to do that never came up. Overall though, it ran a pretty good swath of knowledge.</p>
<p>I’ve rescheduled for Saturday, August 2 at 10:30AM, not because I wanted to wait this long to retry but because that was the first time they had an opening that fit with my schedule.</p>
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