My Personal Experience on Passing VMware 3V0-624 Exam

I have chosen to share my personal experience with the VMware 3V0-624 exam to help others preparing for it. It has been an interesting journey with a serious preparation. The good news is that today, I have passed my 3V0-624, VMware Certified Advanced Professional 6.5 – Data Center Virtualization Design exam. To be truthful, this was not the first time I will be writing this test. The fact is that I first wrote the exam in March and failed. I was going to give up because I have put so much into the preparation and, of course, considering the cost of registering for the exam, I was going to throw in the towel. Well, I decided to give it another try. Thankfully, I discovered that a new version of the test has been released; the 6.5 version and the dreaded design sections have been dropped. I made up my mind to purchase another exam voucher and rewrite the test, and I’m glad that I did it.

My Preparation Experience

To kick start my preparation, I picked up the 6.0 Blueprint because I learnt that the 6.5 exam guide was not as detailed as it should be. Well, I discovered that the 6.0 Blueprint is also not as helpful as I thought it would be. Unfortunately, because the VMware 3V0-624 exam is relatively new, there have been not much write-ups on it. Prior to writing the test, I knew the exam consists of 60 questions and they are multiple-choice ones, drag and drop, and matching formats. I also learnt that the duration for completing the test is 2 hours and 25 minutes. After writing and passing the exam, I think I’ve learnt some couple of tips that I know will be of great help to other test takers.

My Tips to Help in the Exam:

• It is crucial to read the exam prep guide. By reading through the manual, you will understand the types of questions to expect and how you can answer them. As a matter of fact, everything you need to successfully write your VMware 3V0-624 is in this guide.
• When writing the exam, ensure you carefully study the question and design scenario that are given to you. Read and reread and understand the objectives of the question before you answer it.
• The time is enough to complete the exam, especially if you have studied hard for it. So, take your time in completing the questions. Really, there are no longer Visio style exam questions, so you have plenty of time to read the questions and provide the right answers to them.
• There is an opportunity to flag questions and come back to review them. However, you have to be careful with this feature. Most often than not, if you spend a lot of time on a question and still don’t know the answer, the chances that you will know the answer when you come back to it is very slim. So if you come across a question you are not sure of the first time, trust your gut and select the best answer you think best fit the question.
• It is important that you have a strong understanding of limitation of, dependencies required for, and services and features as well as how those dependencies impact on the ability to meet a certain design requirements or introduce risks to the design.
• Understand the components of vSphere deployment, such as upgrades, features, and interoperability.
• On AMPRS, study and understand your Availability, Performance, Management, Security, and Recoverability sections.
• For RCAR, you need to have a deep understanding of Constraints, Requirements, Risks, and Assumption. It is important to mention that if you don’t have a deep understanding of these concepts as well as the concepts of AMPRS, your chances of passing the exam is extremely low. It is also very important that you understand functional versus non-functional requirements as this is a strong aspect of the certification test.

Examination Interface

As I said earlier, the VMware 3V0-624 exam comes in the form of multiple-choice question, drag and drops, and matching formats. Using the interface to complete the test is relatively easy. However, with the drag and drop questions, you have to be careful in working around them because it was quite difficult to review the work when you bring it over the statement. You might not see what was assigned to it without first removing it. For instance, if you are working with diagrams, you will not be able to move on until you enlarge all the diagrams. Even with this, you will have to use the scroll bars to continue with the task. Although, it is quite hard to figure this out but on the long run, it appears to be a good option because with it, you will not be able to move on without completing the task which invariably prevents you from missing something important.

Some Resource Materials

In preparing for the certification exam, I did not use an extensive list of study materials. I only used a couple but the few I used; I made sure I studied them very well. Some of the materials I used in my preparation are highlighted below:

• VCAP5-DCD Official Certification Guide

There is no doubt that this particular resource material is an older version but it still did the job. The critical principles in the guide still work perfectly well and the information I gathered from it is still very relevant to my exam.

• vBrownbag VCAP Series

This material is also an old material but it works just fine. In addition to reviewing the 6.0 series, I also took it a step back and looked over the 5.5 series. You can bet that there is a lot of information on the 6.5 contents that can be gathered from this resource material.

• VMware vSphere 6.x Datacenter Design Cookbook

This book was authored by Hersey Cartwright and it has a whole lot of information that is very critical to the preparation towards this certification exam. As a matter of fact, it was my main study resource for the exam preparation.

Conclusion

My preparation for the VMware 3V0-624 exam was tasking but at the end of the day, the result more than made up for the time dedicated to my preparation.