VCAP-CIA (Cloud Infrastructure Administrator) Beta Experience

On February 13th an ex-colleague forwarded a VCAP-CID Beta inventation to me. My first thought was that there must be a mistake, because VCAP-CID was already GA. But after a closer look I saw that it was a VCAP-CIA (Cloud Infrastructure Administrator) Beta inventation. The beta period was from February 12th to March 1st. I scheduled the exam for February 21st so that I have some time to prepare for it.

I arrived 5 minutes late at the exam day and it took another 5 minutes to do the obligatory login process. After that I sat my exam, completed the 8 Question survey and….. what was that? I got a message from the testing program, that there is no lab prepared. It was the first time I saw such error message. I went to the PearsonVUE administrator and told him my problem. After 1 hour talking to the PearsonVUE technical support they fixed the problem. The problem was that the login window for this beta exam was only 10 minutes after the schedule and I was logged in 12 minutes after that. So my first advice for this and the other VCAP exams, don't be late. After an one hour delay I was ready to take this exam but the exam time counter was not stopped during the "troubleshooting session". The only thing the PearsonVUE administrator could do was to add an additional 30 minutes to the counter so that I only lost 30-40 minutes on the exam.

Here are some thoughts on the exam:

• Read the blueprint
• Don't be late!!!!!!!
• The exam is vCloud Suite 5.1 based (vCloud Director 5.1, vCNS 5.1)
• It is not so time consuming as the VCAP-DCA. I got 30 minutes left.
• The performance of the Lab was not really satisfied (RDP – RDP – Flash) but after a while it was ok
• The exam is objective-based so only the result counts. How you accomplish this is up to you.
• If you get stuck at a question go to the next one. I got some questions which I hopefully answered correct after seeing the next one. There are also some dependent questions.

Because of my location (Austria-based) I implemented only one vCloud Director at that time, but with this experience I did not find the exam terribly difficult. There were some areas I haven't worked with but you can use all the documentation and that helped me to answer some of the questions. I'm now waiting for the score but after reading some CID Beta experience blog posts I have to wait until VCAP-CIA is release and that can take some time.

Good luck to anyone taking the exam!