VCAP6-DTM Deploy prep started

After VMworld I decided vcap6-dtm deploy would be my first real attempt at a vcap (I don’t count the design since 2 weeks prep impossibly is enough). In between the vcp7-dtm beta came around so the prepping for the Deploy exam really starts now. I am currently rebuilding my homelab for this since this wil take hours and hours of lab time. Some very good people have already attempted and failed this exam so i really need to take all the time I can get. To bad the blueprint isn’t available as a pdf but I copy/pasted the page from VMware.com and it can be found here. I have downloaded most of the documents stated in there and those can be found over here.

 

Received the VCAP6-DTM Design beta exam result

Well as expected I failed this one miserably! I scored 183 where 300 was required while the scoring range is 100-500. Points to improve are all over the place so I guess it’s all back to the drawing boards while I’m still not sure if I want to do the deploy first or not.

Also I only hard from people whom also failed this Beta and no passes yet!

My experience with the vcap6-dtm design beta exam

At the end of march i received a mail by VMware to take part in the VCAP6-DTM Design beta exam. I received this probably because I took part in (and passed) the vcp6-dtm exam in January. There was not a lot of preparation time available since the last day to take the exam was april 15th but with 2 weeks and a couple of days worth I thought it might be a good exercise for me. Having hardly any design experience and no experience doing vcap exams I saw this as a learning exercise  from the start. About 1 to 3 hours I spend every day going over all the white papers en reviewing reference designs.

I decided to take this exam in the afternoon because of the length, normally I do exams in the morning but guessing I would need every minute I had to spare and then for me personally the afternoon was a better fit. The exam itself consisted of multiple drag & drops and the visio simulator. Everything seemed to work fine to me but the small monitors they have in my exam center didn’t really help with the visio parts. I answered most of the questions to my best knowledge. One question was about all the ports that needed to be opened in the firewall and that was something I decided on not to study to hard on since those things need more then 1 or 2 reads to cram them in my head. I made the drawing for the functional part but added no ports. In other questions I think they where heading to something but the restrictions in the questions ruled that out and I explained that in my remarks.

In the end I have totally no idea if I passed but if not I will be sure to do this exam once more. I have been waiting for a month now but guess I might need to wait another month for the results. My goals is already reached by doing the exam and having experience in what they might ask next time.