VCP-IaaS: Exam Resources

I recently passed the VCP-IaaS exam and thought I would share the resources I used in case it is useful for anyone else. This is the exam which gives those already certified as VCP on vSphere, the VCP-Cloud certification.

  1. I took the VMware vCloud Director: Install, Configure, Manage [V5.1] course as my primary source. I enjoyed the course and felt it had a good mix of theory and hands on work. There are plenty of new networking concepts to grasp, so it was good to have many whiteboarded descriptions of them from a knowledgeable instructor. One thing to watch out for is that the course covers version 5.1, but the exam as of this date is still 1.5 - so you need to make sure you are aware of the key differences. Not many of significance for the exam, but the instructor did a good job of pointing them out. Why the exam is still testing 1.5 when 5.1 has been out since September 2012 I’m not sure!

  2. The instructor told us that the previous version of the course for version 1.5 contained vCenter Chargeback content, but it had been removed from this course. It’s covered in the exam though, so a bit annoying that it’s no longer in the course. However, I found a free self-paced online course, VMware vCenter Chargeback Manager Fundamentals [V2.5]. Having sat through this I can see why it was removed from the vCD training course (boring). Apart from some technical information needed on setting it up, it’s mostly aimed at beancounters, but useful for getting enough info you need for the exam.

  3. As always with any VMware exam make sure you read the blueprint and ensure you work through the mock exam. The blueprint is particularly helpful since it links to the correct versions of PDFs for the versions of vCD and vCenter Chargeback being tested on the exam.

  4. Whether you install vCD in your homelab or not the online Hands-On-Labs from VMware contains one lab for vCD and two for vShield which are well worth doing for additional practise.

  5. It’s always good to get some practise questions in to get you used to the typical kind of question you might be used in the exam. So in addition to the mock exam, I also used the vCD practise tests from Paul McSharry.

  6. Gregg Robertson has a useful list of VCP-IasS resources on his blog.

  7. One thing to get to grip with are the vCD networking naming terms, external, internal, isolate, direct, routed, various combinations of those terms etc and what they refer to. Between the training course, various blog sites and the exam, different terms often seem to be used to be used for the same concepts which led to some confusion for me during the exam.

  8. As of the date publishing this post there is a 50% off code for any VCP exam available from this page on the Pearson Vue site.

In summary I felt that as with the vSphere VCP exam if you have enough hands-on-experience combined with a good understanding of the theory fundamentals, then you should be fine.