I know I have been pushing back my vSphere exam for a while due to the amount of projects I am working on this year. I have finally passed my exam two days back with a blazing score of 494(haha thought it would be quite lower than this, but I guess the elimination process of answers that does not make sense had worked out very well on this one). I would love to thank everyone in the VMware community who had posted tips for the VCP exam especially Kumaran, Brian, Scott Vessey.  As my return to the community I have decided to post some tips for the exam:

First Tip: VCP-410 is not only covering your  daily VMware work, its more than that. I have seen many questions in the VCP-410 exam, which I had never needed to use before in practice or have came across it once every few years. You will have to know the VMware material very well, do not show up to the exam only with your work experience. Read & read more of VMware vSphere Documentation.

Second Tip: The exam cover VMware networking in way more details, than most VMware enviornment require. Make sure you know VMware networking very well  & get familiar with terms like beaconing, Promiscuous Mode, vdistributed switch. Make sure you are familiar of how the traditional vswitches difference in functionality from VMware vdistributed switches as well the process of migrating between them. Don’t underestimate the networking part of VMware for the exam, as I have been suprised of how many question covering networking has popped up in the exam.

Third Tip: Make sure you know VMware features in and out & that you know which feature is available in which VMware vSphere edition.

Fourth Tip: Make sure you are familiar with VMware Storage structure. How does VMware operate in SAN, ISCSI & NAS enviornment. Get familiar with VMware datastore as well with the different type of Virtual disks & RDMs available in VMware.

Fifth Tip: Make sure you memorize the minimum & maximums limits of VMware. Memorize the numbers as they will show up. As a gift from me below is a small part of my study cheat sheet covering some of the numbers that can show up for the exam. Five of these had shown up on my exam, though I can’t point out the exact one due to VMware Exam Policy.

• The default swap partition size for VMware ESX 4 is 600 MB
• In order to upgrade to vsphere 4 an esx host must have a /boot partition of at least 100MB
• The Maximum transmission Unit (MTU) for jumbo frames in vsphere is 9000
• The maximum number of LUNs that can be assigned per ESX Host is 256
• The maximum number of VMFS datastore per ESX host is 256
• ESX 3.0 server support access to 128 LUNS during the initial installation process
• The maximum number of paths allowed in ESX 4.x for iscsi lun is 8
• The default port used by iscsi in vsphere is 3260
• The maximum number of NFS datastores per ESX/ESXi 4 server is 64
• ESX Server support NFS Version 3 over TCP
• cold cloning a physical server using vCenter converter require minimum 264MB of Ram
• vcenter converter require the following TCP Ports: 139,443,445, and 902
• Maximum number of systems guided consolidaiton can simultaneously analyze is 100
• The maximum available memomry for a virtual machine in vsphere 4 is 255GB
• The maximum numbers of characters that can be used when naming a vApp is 80
• The maximum number of hosts in a vmware HA cluster is 32
• The maximum number of VMware Data Recovery backup jobs that can run concurrently is 8
• Maximum # of Virtual CPUs per Virtual machine on vSphere  is 8
• Maximum # of Physical CPUs per Host is 64
• Maximum # of Logical Processors per Host is 64
• Maximum # of Cores per Cluster is 4096 cores
• Maximum RAM per host is 1TB

Sixth Tip: Take an advantage of VMware 2nd Shot program till the end of the year. If you register for the program & fail the exam you can apply for the second time for free. Check out the link below for details:

http://mylearn1.vmware.com/portals/certification/

Good luck on the exam, I got to go for now & prepare for my next project.