Exam Experience – VCAP6-DCV Deployment exam
Yesterday I finally sat my first VCAP exam after my paternity leave which was VCAP6-DCV deployment (3V0-623).
General exam info
The exam duration is with 190min shorter then the VCAP5-DCA (I think it was 240min) exam and there is NO additional 30min for people where the primary language is not english. In total there were 27 questions covering the complete blue print. The exam is delivered in a new Hands on Lab (HOL) fashion with it’s shiny HTML5 interface. So if you have experience with VMware HOLs then you will be alright.
Experience
Quite after the beginning of the exam I was getting mad because the keyboard mapping was just a mess. I ended up with the on-screen keyboard which is for this time constraint exam not the best way to go. I hope this will change in the future because you lose so much time going to the on-screen keyboard and then clicking in the window you want to write something.
You should also be aware that CRTL, ALT and to my surprise also BACKSPACE are not working. I tried to use BACKSPACE a lot of times and was ending up going back with arrow keys and then using delete. As you can imagine this is also not a time saver. In the introduction it is mentioned that you should only use the WebClient. Don’t use VMRC or the Console from the vSphere Client (C#) and the reason for that is that you can’t release the focus of the console without using CRTL and ALT. It would then be a challenge to release the focus without using these keys.
You can still use vSphere Client for configuration tasks like I did. Overall the exam was ok and it was from my side easier then the VCAP5-DCA exam. Some tasks you can complete in nearly under 5min, some others will take 5-10min because you need first to think about it how it could work.
As I mentioned in my previous experience posts, just read the question carefully and to the end. Some of the questions had a task you only see if you read it through the end. I also missed 2-3 questions because I hadn’t done these tasks before and the time was running out. If I had the time extension as non-native english speaker I maybe would have finished these tasks.
I can understand why VMware dropped this extension. In my opinion it gave the non-native english speakers an advantage over the native speakers on this exam. I think everybody who is doing such exams have enough english language skills to do it like a native speaker. For me english was not the challenge here. But this is only for deployment exam.
When doing design exams there are sometimes words a non-native speaker maybe never heard before and don’t understand. So with design exams an 30min extension would be totally fine.
The overall HTML5 performance was from my point of view much much better compared to the old exams.
Preparation
To be honest I’m not really preparing for DCV deployment exams because I’m doing this stuff on a day 2 day basis. I went through the blue print and looked for topics I have never done before and tested it in my homelab environment or in a deployed HOL lab.
I would also recommend to look at the VCAP6-DCV Deployment Study Guide from Kyle Jenner. Great stuff there.
Here are some other VCAP6-DCV deployment exam experience posts I would recommend to read:
- Chris Chua – VCAP6 – DCV Deploy Beta Experience
- Sam McGeown – #VMworld 2016 – VCAP6-DCA Deploy Exam Experience
- Ross Wynne – My VCAP6-DCV Deploy Experience
- David Stamen – My VCAP6 DCV Deploy Beta Experience
- Nicholas Scuola – My VCAP6-DCV Deploy Beta Experience
The scoring of deployment exams is always quite fast and I received my score under 1 hour. I passed it with 415 points which is the best score I’ve ever received on a VCAP exam.
Here you can find more information about the VCAP6-DCV deployment exam.