I passed my VCP4 way back in 2011. Shortly after (very shortly!) those pesky developers released vSphere5. VMware generously allowed VCP4’s to upgrade by the end of Feb 2012. Whilst that was generous, at the time my brain was frazzled from VCP4 study, I’d only just really got stuck in to vSphere4 deployments and wanted to get hands-on v5 experience before I sat the VCP5 exam.

Time passed. VCP split into VCP-DCV, VCP-Cloud, VCP-DT. V5.0, 5.1 and now 5.5 have been released. Anyway, having missed the Feb 29th deadline I asked for an upgrade course, VMWN5. For various reasons that didn’t materialise and so I was in the limbo of feeling ready to study and sit my VCP5 but not having the qualifying course, e.g. ICM or What’s New.

Now my employer is a VMware Partner and I’d already been taking advantage of the VMware Partner University and got my VTSP5. Although this is a slightly “salesy” qualification it is certainly a lot more technical than most “free” accreditations out there. It’s purpose, as I understand it, is to give you the skills to suggest vSphere solutions to meet customers requirements and needs. The kind of skills you would need for a Technical Sales Engineer type role, say.

So there I sat in limbo, I’d taken advantage of what I could without deciding on shelling out £2500 of my own money to do the ICM course. Then along came a mail. Partners were being given the opportunity to sit the VCP5 as long as they had VCP4 and/or VCP3 and relevant experience with vSphere5.

After a lot of fiddling about to get pre-authorised and then finding some vouchers didn’t work, it was confirmed yesterday that the exam would be approved and that I can sit it.

So here begins my journey. I will be blogging it as much for my own purposes. If someone else finds this useful great. I know that I’m probably 10,987th in the line of people to do a “my vcp revision blog” but I’m going to be looking for others who have done so already and referencing them heavily (with credit of course!).

As Scott Vesey said when I did the ICM VI3 course and the VMWN4.1 course (and on his blog) the simple key to the exam is BLUEPRINT BLUEPRINT BLUEPRINT If it’s not on the Blueprint. It won’t be in the exam. So don’t waste time studying it.

As such I’ll be following the tried and tested route of many others of writing a post per objective. There are 7 Sections, each with 2 to 5 objectives. Each objective has between 23 and 46 “knowledge items” This may sound daunting but someone’s already broken down those hundreds of bits of knowledge and if you’ve used vSphere5 lots and installed it and if you have a homelab of any sort then between practical and documentation you should be able to read about it, e.g. the available editions of vCenter, or do it, for say expanding a Thin-Provisioned disk to Thick.

Next up brief post about me and my setup and revision plan, then straight into the objectives.