Posted by Last week I passed the VCAP-CID. So far I’ve passed the VCAP-DCA, DCD, CIA and CID. While I thought the CID was the most difficult among these tests, I scored far better on it than the other tests. I must have guessed correctly a lot 🙂 About halfway through the test I was kicking myself for not studying much. I read the VCAT about a year ago and should have brushed up on it. A lot of the questions covered things that I’ve done in vCloud at one point but haven’t touched recently.
Of course I can’t provide details of the questions that were on the test, but I wanted to mention a few things that may help.
I didn’t take the VMware vCloud: Design Best Practices course, but I’ve taken the VMware vSphere: Design Workshop and a lot of the design focus material applied to the CID. So if you haven’t taken either the DCD or CID, I’d definitely recommend taking this course. It’s one of the better courses I’ve ever taken.
Study the blueprint at the VCAP-CID overview page and make sure you have some familiarity with each topic as I’m sure at least one question is from each topic. You may also find an answer or two from it.
You’re no longer able to go back to previous questions, which probably affects the way most people take these tests. I used to skip questions that I was unsure about and come back to them at the end. This means that time management is more important than before. You’re told that you have 6 of the design type of questions. I try to spend a maximum of 15 minutes on these questions. You also have a fair amount of drag and drop questions, which can also be quite time consuming. The remaining questions are multiple choice, which can often be completely quickly, but the wording on some can be tricky so make sure you read them carefully. They often feel like traps. I’ll think, “OK, I can completely this quickly” and at the last second realize I skimmed over something important and would have picked the wrong answer. Knowing how much time you have for the test, I like to half it and write it down so I’ll have a good gauge of whether I should speed it up or not. You don’t want to rush through questions and finish with time left over or not finish the exam. I also like to note how many of the design questions I’ve completed and how long I spend on each of them. If I spend 15 minutes on each of them, that’s 90 minutes for the entire test. This is a large portion of your time considering that the exam is 195 minutes long. I also like to do this in case I’m getting close to the end and know I have more design questions coming up. This probably feels like basic info, but I can’t overstate how important time management is for these tests.
Before the test I tried to get confirmation on whether or not the test covered vCloud 1.5 or 5.1. Based off of the questions, it is vCloud 1.5. This is important to know because it affects your storage options at the pvDC level as well as availability and resource options for the management VMs.
Other than that, make sure to know the following in and out:
- vApp networking including direct, org and vApp networks with and without fencing
- Catalogs management between multiple organizations
- Roles and permissions
- COE Roles
- Design concepts such as assumptions, risks, constraints, etc
- VCAT!
orchestration.io 