I recently took the VCAP5 – DCD exam and wanted to share my experience for anyone who is preparing   for this exam as well.

Study

In my opinion this is a fairly difficult exam to do any sort of preparation for.  Most of my preparation was just every day design that I’ve acquired over the years.  I think the biggest trick for a lot of administrators is to switch from a mode of thinking about things in a breakfix method, but rather as a holistic design methodology.  I prefer to look at a design as a “pie in the sky” approach where I put all the best solutions I can come up with to meet a design requirement, and then start to modify those based on any constraints that might be known.

If you want some good study material for this Certification I would clearly start with the blueprint.  VCAP5-DCD blueprint.

If you need more instruction about any of the specific areas or just find that you need a refresher I would suggest Nick Marshall’s site:  VirtualNetworkDesign.com

Format

I read a little bit about the format before my exam and found conflicting info about it.  At the time of my exam, once you finish a question, you are NOT allowed to go back.  There is no opportunity to mark questions for review and go back later.  This does make the exam a bit difficult but I believe they changed the format to avoid some confusion with the design questions.

My test had 100 questions total and I had about 4 hours to complete them.  Time was a factor which I’ll talk about later.  Six of the questions were design questions which were a Visio type exercise.  I highly recommend looking at a demo before the exam so you don’t spend time on learning the formats during the test.  VCAP5-DCD EXAM UI Demo

The rest of the questions were a fairly even mix of multiple choice and drag and drop questions.  These drag and drop questions would of course leave the caveat that not all of the answer may be used, and some may be used more than once.

My Tips

Get a good nights sleep before the exam, and use the restroom before the test.  This is a four hour exam and I needed most of that time to finish.

Caffeine:  Did I mention it’s four hours?

Exam Opinions

I found the exam to be too long.  The exam does make you think about design situations but it could be shortened and still be able to determine whether or not you know enough to posses a certification.  By the time I was finishing the exam, I think I was clicking answers without really thinking too much about the questions.

Good Luck to anyone sitting this exam.  Hopefully my experience was useful to you.