Desktop Tested

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.

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 recipe for a rough morning.

But enough excuses…

I did read the exam blueprint; as with every certification 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 plagiarize what I wrote a few months ago after taking the VCAP-DCA exam to help explain the format for the test.

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-provisioned storage.

In other VMware exams, you’re given 60–70 multiple-choice questions to regurgitate answers to. In the VCAP, you are given 26 different “projects” you have to work your way through. I say projects because each of the 26 will vary in length and have multiple component problems to solve. Some may be straightforward, some far less so.

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.

You start with 180 minutes, and halfway 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 environment from the testing center, and there was a lack of clear direction about the environment and in some of the questions.

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 experience, 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.

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.