Today, after a week of extensive blogging and prepping I’ve passed my VCAP-DCD exam :-) The exam consists of over one hundred questions ranging from "the simple multiple choice" and "choose all that apply" ones to the "create a diagram for the following situation" challenges. It’s hard to prep for this exam, either you know how to create a design or you don’t but a proper design is built upon up-to-date knowledge and that’s where you should work on if you don’t feel confident.
The exam is based on vSphere 4.1 so make sure you have in-depth knowledge about all the great features this release has brought us. The blueprint has links to PDF documents about LBT, Storage IO Control and Network IO Control to name a few and reading those document really has helped me passing the exam. Reading is not enough, create your own scenarios and configure things like shares and reservations in your lab, by learning this way it is much easier to memorize all the information from the PDF documents.
As a VMware Certified Instructor I’ve delivered the vSphere Design Workshop many times and although other people speak differently, I think the exam and the Design Workshop are perfectly aligned. After attending the Workshop, I would recommend to go through all the best practices and the Design Workflow once again before doing the exam. It will definitely help you. Although this exam wasn’t mandatory for me (VCAP-DCA is mandatory for delivering the advanced courses) it is a prerequisite for the VCDX defence and that’s my next goal.
