Exam Experience – VCAP6-DTM Design exam beta

After VCAP6-DTM design exam (3V0-652) was released I scheduled it after my short vacation on April 6th. 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 38 question, 10 visio tool design questions and 28 normal drag & Drop questions. As I wrote in my previous exam experience post about VCAP6-DCV design and VCAP6-CMA design you will not find any multiple or single choice question here as well. I have done the VCAP-DTD several years ago and it was a really good exam. So my expectations for this beta was quite high.

Experience

If you went through the older VCAP-DTD exam, this one is more challenging than the old one. The reason for this is that DTM consists not only of Horizon View stuff in this version but also, according to the exam blue print, of AppVolumes, Mirage and VMware Identity Manager (Workspace). I went through the questions and skipped this time all visio question (marked it for review) so I can complete it in the end. I saw from the other 2 exams that this strategy is the best for me, because you can find yourself lost in the visio questions. Going back and forth between visio tool questions was again not a big deal, you only have to wait until everything is loaded again before doing new stuff.
As with the other 2 design exams, make sure you read the drag & drop questions and the instruction on the left-hand side carefully.
The improvement of the requirement section (what needs to be connected to what) of the visio tool questions was again really good. You find now information that clearly defines the connectivity required between the objects. This is the biggest improvement I have seen with the design exams.
Some of the answers to some questions had a different wording as you would expect for a specific feature. I don’t know If I remember these features incorrectly or if the wording was wrong / misleading. I put it anyway in the comment box.
From my personal feeling it’s a 50:50 chance that I have passed the exam but let’s see what really the final score is. Beta scoring takes approx. 6-10 weeks after the beta period ended.
There was already an update to the expected beta results dates. Here you see when each of the exams get their GA release and beta scoring report.

Preparation

Because I was on vacation with the family before the exam, I had only little time for preparation which means I took a sneak peak into the following documents. Some of them I knew already because it was my third design beta exam:

• 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)
• VMware Horizon 6 with App Volumes and Virtual SAN Reference Architecture
• VMware Mirage Large-Scale Reference Architecture
• Administering View Cloud Pod Architecture
• VMware Horizon with View and Virtual SAN Reference Architecture
• VMware Horizon 6 with View Performance and Best Practices
• VMware Horizon 6 Reference Architecture
• VMware Horizon View Large-Scale Reference Architecture
• VMware Horizon 6 Storage Considerations

Unfortunately there are no other -VCAP6-DTM design experiences blog posts available at the moment.