It has been years since I did any type of Certification. If I remember correctly, the last one was the Brocade Certified Fabric Professional back in 2003 or so. Before that, I had done numerous Novell certifications and had a pretty reliable study method. My current company doesn't care about certifications and doesn't reimburse for the exams. So since I'm not planning to hit the job market, I just never cared. But for some reason, with the VCP, it fell different. We started virtualizing our non-prod environments back in 2007 or so with VMware 2.x. We standardized our environment a little with 3.x and finally went full bore into production with 4.1. The only VMware training I had was during the 3.x days. I never took the VCP tests, as it didn't seem important and, to be honest, I wasn't sure it was something we would stick with. Well it is 2016 and we are still heavy VMware customers.
Last year, we had some VMware credits left over that expired around the end of the year. So we were offered training classes. I ended up taking the vSphere 6 Bootcamp. The content was great, but I'm not sure I would do a 12 hour a day class again. That was a beating. But during the class, I decided I would go ahead and prepare for the VCP. So I studied for a few weeks and took the vSphere Foundations Exam (2V0-620). I passed (barely) the exam the first try. It was actually much harder than I had expected. Using a few of the leftover credits, I was able to also obtain the VMware Learning Zone package. There are Exam Prep videos for the 620 exam as well as 621 and 621-D. Watching the videos for the 620 exam and taking notes was pretty much the only studying I did. But again, I barely passed the 620 exam. I scored 320 (300 is passing). I'm not sure how that equates to number of questions missed or anything. I really felt the exam was pretty hard. I have a lot of experience with vSphere, but only in our environment. We only run NFS storage (with a little bit of iSCSI). We only run standard switches (with a few exceptions). Anyway, there are some parts of vSphere, that I have no experience at all with.
One thing I didn't do during the first exam, was to study the additional materials that the video listed. Like the vSphere Troubleshooting Guide. It felt like quite a few questions were pulled directly from this guide. So in my studying for the 621 exam I'm making sure to download and study the additional materials. So far I've been spending a lot of time on the vSphere Security Guide. One of the suggestions in the exam prep videos was to pick a date to take the exam and begin studying. So I made a study chart (for work days only). It shows the sections I want to study and on what days. I also found a few Hands-On Labs related to a few objectives, that I'll do. I created an Excel worksheet to track what I'm doing each day:
Just a way for me to keep up with what to study each day. I only have a little time each day to study. I just need to make sure I'm using the time efficiently. I'll keep updates as I study and prepare for the 621 exam.