Exam Experience – VCAP6-CMA Design exam beta
Thanks to Ross Wynne I scheduled the beta version of the VCAP6-CMA design exam (3V0-632) on the last day of beta availability. Most of you reading this are familiar with this kind of exam so I will keep the introduction short.
General exam info
Exam duration is 240min plus an additional 30min for people where the primary language is not english. In total there were 39 question and according to other exam experience posts it was split between 12 visio tool design questions and 27 normal drag & Drop questions. As I wrote in my previous exam experience post about VCAP6-DCV design you will not find any multiple or single choice question here as well. I have done the VCAP-CID several years ago and I thought I will give the CMA design a try even if I’m not so familiar with vRealize Automation. The design exam is based on vRealize Automation 6.x.
As far as I heard the GA exam should be only 2 hours long with less questions. From my point of view this will be an improvement because sitting in a testing center for 4,5 hours is not much fun. 🙂
Experience
This exam didn’t went as smooth as the DCV design and the reason for that was my lack of experience in this topic. So with most of the questions when it comes to specific vRA topics I had to guess what could be the right answer. Going back and forth between visio tool questions was not a big deal, you only have to wait until everything is loaded again before doing new stuff.
As with the DCV design exam, make sure you read the drag & drop questions and the instruction on the left-hand side carefully.
Like the VCAP6-DCV design beta the improvement of the requirement section (what needs to be connected to what) of the visio tool questions was really good. You find now information that clearly defines the connectivity required between the objects.
I hadn’t seen any issues like in the DCV design exam where questions or answers were not completed. Some of the questions were also little bit vague and it was not clear what was really required.
From my personal feeling I would say that I have failed the exam but let’s see what really the final score is. Beta scoring takes approx. 6-10 weeks after the beta period ended.
Preparation
Because I hadn’t so much time to prepare for it (3 days or less) I only look through the following documents especially the vRA topics:
- Functional versus Non-functional Requirements
- Conceptual, Logical, Physical: It is Simple
- Constraints, Assumptions (Risks, Requirements) & Dependencies
- Systems Architecture Fundamentals – Conceptual, Logical, Physical Designs
- VCDX Design defencee blueprint (Availability, Manageability, Performance, Security, Recoverability)
- vRealize Automation Machine Life Cycle Extensibility
- vRealize Automation Comparison of Single-Tenant and Multitenant Deployments
- vRealize Automation User Roles Overview
Here are some other exam experience posts I would recommend to read: